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It was just before lunchas Alex Bickart loped down a relatively quiet hallway in his small Vermont high school, his thoughts elsewhere, when he was startled by his guidance counselor, who wanted a word with him. (“My first thought was, ‘Oh God, what’s happened?’” Alex recalled.)

This was early last September at Peoples Academy, a regional high school in Morrisville, Vermont, a half hour’s drive north of Montpelier. The school serves about 250 students from eight rural communities; Alex’s town, Elmore, is among the smallest. “Our downtown,” he noted, “is five buildings.”

Alex stands out. He’s six feet, seven inches tall, with a wide range of interests: he skis, plays tennis, and competed last year in the Science Olympiad and the Vermont Envirothon, in which student teams explore natural-resource issues. And that September morning, his counselor had pegged him to be an ideal candidate for a rather nontraditional learning initiative. Which is how he wound up in a small, windowless room meeting with Bill Rich, a 1999 graduate of the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English and the coordinator for the Vermont Bread Loaf Teacher Network. (Now 23 years old, the network fosters year-round collaboration for teachers educated at Bread Loaf; Rich coordinates the group of educators working in Vermont.)

An education consultant, Bill Rich easily connects with young people—he has taught English in both middle and high schools—and he struck Alex as affable and chatty while describing a yearlong, full-credit course that was being made available to a select group of Vermont students.

What Rich described was unlike anything Alex had ever heard before—students would be responsible for not only designing their own curriculum, but deciding what they would study. “And then he was gone,” said Alex, “and I was left with a choice: continue with the mind-numbing repetition that is every English class ever, or take a risk on this mysterious program that seemed to promise so much?”

Ultimately, he said, it wasn’t much of a choice at all, and a few weeks later he found himself with 20 other students who had traveled to Middlebury College—most from schools in or near Addison County, plus three who are homeschooled—in kicking off the second year of this pilot project titled “What’s the Story?” Designed and run by the Vermont Bread Loaf Teacher Network in collaboration with the College, the project flips the traditional approach to high school courses: Students choose their topics (the one requirement is that they involve “work toward positive change”) and design their curriculum, working in multiage, multischool teams; teachers act as coaches or mentors from the sidelines.

During the fall, students would research, blog about, and develop their topic idea, with feedback from adult volunteers. On an overnight retreat in late October, the students would pitch their ideas in short, TED Talk–style presentations. They’d then form into five teams. Each team would choose a single topic, on which its members would work—theoretically, at least—in creative, technology-aided collaboration until spring.

By design, each project should be different than any other, but to shape and assess everyone’s learning, Rich and Tim O’Leary, an English teacher at Middlebury Union High School and 2007 Bread Loaf grad, had devised specific academic standards that each student was required to meet. To pass, every student would have to show they’d developed skills, knowledge, and experience in communicating, creative problem-solving, self-directed learning, savvy use of multimedia, collaboration, and active citizenship.

In his consulting work, Rich uses brain science to help schools design personalized learning plans. “The big challenge,” he says, “is to make sure the students are really emotionally engaged in the work they’re doing. The ideal is, how do we design learning so that the work students do is going to prepare them for the rest of their lives?”

***

Bill Rich, MA English ’99

What’s the Story?” was developed in 2014–15, as an elective that involved 11 students from five Vermont high schools, each doing an individual project on family farming. Last year the project expanded into a full-credit course on student-selected topics; 10 teachers from the Vermont Bread Loaf Teacher Network acted as mentors to the teams, with about 60 community volunteers also involved, including some College staff. Most of the volunteers helped individual students refine their initial topic interests during the early “I-Search” phase; the adult responders were urged to ask “probing or clarifying questions,” to suggest resources, to “help push their thinking.”

Today, as the 2016-17 school year begins, the Vermont Bread Loaf Teacher Network hopes to keep growing its course, into what could become a model—statewide, even nationally—for the effort to make high school education more meaningful—and memorable.

“We’ve known for years that not all children are best served by sitting in the classroom in rows and having the teacher lecture them, and we’ve seen a tremendous change in the ways that people can access knowledge,” notes David Sharpe, a retired teacher who chairs the Vermont House Committee on Education as a state representative from Bristol. “The role of teachers is changing, from delivering pedagogical information to coaching students. The model where students pick a subject to research it and make a presentation—that’s the type of model that I think education is moving toward.”

Vermont has put muscle behind that movement, with two recent changes in education law and policy. After years of failed efforts to promote creative change in how high schools deliver education, in 2013 the Legislature enacted Act 77, the Flexible Pathways Initiative. The law now requires that every high schooler get the chance to combine learning experiences from within and outside the school classroom, in personalized ways that may propel more young Vermonters toward postsecondary success.

Also in 2013, the state made its education standards proficiency-based. Rather than just passing classes, in order to graduate students will have to show they’ve gained actual skills, knowledge, and experience. Vermont is leaving it to individual schools to decide how they’ll do that, but has required that new graduation requirements be in place for the Class of 2020.

Bill Rich calls those two changes a “double helix, of personalization and standards-based learning.” The key question, he says, is “how do we make high school an environment where there really is personalization, but we don’t lose the standards?”

Most students who attend Middlebury’s graduate School of English are educators working toward master’s degrees, and for these normally harried schoolteachers, Bread Loaf becomes a kind of think tank, an incubator for new ideas—and up on the mountain campus one summer afternoon in 2014, a group of Vermont teachers sat on a lawn and started talking about a new type of course.

The time was right, with the passage of Act 77 and the change in standards, and the College had brought in a sizable grant from a donor who wanted to support a project aimed at social change in Vermont. The teachers sketched out a course that could be based, in creative ways, on multimedia storytelling.

“We weren’t sure it was going to take off and work,” Rich recalls. “We underestimated the power of our design.”

“To me, the power of ‘What’s the Story?’—and where it could impact schools and school systems significantly—is in its focus on students taking the lead, and constructing their own learning,” observes Peter Burrows, the superintendent of schools in Middlebury and its surrounding small communities. Burrows has been closely involved with the project and says it’s hard to legislate the kind of change within schools that Act 77 is calling for—but “What’s the Story?” may be helping point the way.

“When you look at how ‘What’s the Story?’ has been developed and designed, students are provided with a structure,” he notes, “but within that structure, there is immense responsibility they have, to construct something meaningful to them. And they have to present that, so there’s action involved as well, which is a critical piece of what needs to happen.”

***

By April, the students had been working—some more than others—on their projects for several months. Team members often live in different communities—one resides up in Derby, on the Canadian border—so most of their meetings are virtual, using Skype, email, or other digital tools to stay in touch. But with deadlines looming, the teams made weekend plans to convene with their mentors in central locations to gauge their progress. Almost immediately, it was clear that some teams were doing just fine; others were struggling.

In a classroom at Middlebury Union High School, one team was focused on the state’s recent decision to cut the number of emergency dispatch centers, from four centers to two. The project idea came from Brennan Bordonaro, a soft-spoken sophomore from rural Hancock, which sits along the eastern border of Addison County, just down the hill from the Snow Bowl. That day, Bordonaro was wearing a Vermont Fire Academy ball cap; he’s been a member of his local fire department since he was 14. He’s also a hunter, a fisherman, and a member of the regional ambulance crew. His initial take on the dispatch-center cuts, he said, came from talking with locals in Hancock, other volunteers like himself.

“I went into this very one-sided—I didn’t know the other side,” he admitted. As his team gathered information and interviewed people like the state’s public safety commissioner, however, his viewpoint expanded.

“I think the real issue is that neither side talks to the other side. There just isn’t enough communication,” he said. “Each side has their own viewpoint, and neither is listening to the other.”

In the next room, teacher/mentor Ben Krahn, MA English ’09, seemed frustrated with a team that hadn’t yet refined its vague interest in solar power. The students needed to put a video together, but they didn’t know where to begin.

“I think we need to get messy,” Krahn urged. “Let’s figure out the beginning—what does the beginning look like? Is it a shot of something, or someone talking? Let’s figure out how to start it.”

There wasn’t much response. But about 25 miles away at Champlain Valley Union High School in Hinesburg, another team was closing in fast on its goal.

“Breaking Binary” was this group’s title. Its three members, two from CVU and a homeschooled middle schooler, were in the media lab finishing a film on how schools can broaden perspectives and vocabulary around gender identity. Their blog was full of probing reflections, and in a week their film would win one of the top awards at the second annual Freedom & Unity youth film festival in Montpelier.

“I’ve worked really, really hard on this—I’ve been in here at least an hour and a half every day since January,” said CVU junior Eva Rocheleau, as classmate Becca Cottrell prepared to record a voiceover.

Fiona Nelson and Eva Rocheleau

“So how,” Cottrell read, “do we as teachers, students, friends, and leaders support a safe and accepting school community where everyone can thrive, regardless of gender identity or expression?”

Later, Rinkema reflected on what she’s witnessed during the year. “We don’t always know what a student is really learning, and independent study isn’t always a well-targeted learning experience,” she said. “With this, we really see the growth. We have particular targets—and they’re getting feedback along the way.”

Dark-eyed and full of ideas, Eva Rocheleau is involved with a school club called Think Tank, which works to promote education reform. She also plays Ultimate Frisbee and sings world folk music with Village Harmony, a summertime touring choral program for teens. When she started the I-Search process, Rocheleau was first interested in the threats facing honeybees—but when she shifted her focus to gender identity, she discovered a new-found passion for the subject.

“I have to stop and remind myself, ‘Oh, I’m going to get credit for this amazing experience that’s changing my life?’ This is what I want to do,” she said. “I want to make activism documentaries. So it was almost overwhelmingly exciting for me to do that.”

Rinkema, Rocheleau’s mentor, has seen this transformation in students before. “There’s something that happens occasionally, where a course stops being a course for a student,” she said. “Partway through the first semester, that happened for Eva.”

At the third school, in South Burlington, Bill Rich was helping guide Alex Bickart’s group, which was struggling to pull together its work on foster parenting in Vermont. Later, Rich put things in perspective.

“They’re adolescents,” he said. “When given autonomy, they tend to mess up a little. It’s okay; let them mess up. Give them some feedback. It’s remarkable how much they learn about themselves when they don’t have us hovering over them the whole time, telling them what to do.”

***

After he was introduced to “What’s the Story?” during its first year, Bill Koulopoulos, the College’s director of academic technology, decided to make the course the focus of his dissertation for an educational doctorate at Columbia University.

“For a teacher, this is Shangri-La,” he explains, “because it brings together 21st-century skills where students learn to collaborate, learn to communicate, learn critical thinking, and they create. You provide them with the equipment, you have people from different backgrounds giving them feedback, they move from their world to the outside world, and the final product is something that could be used to advocate for change. At this young age.”

In May came the final phase. During their last overnight retreat at a center in Lincoln earlier in the month, the teams previewed their work to each other. Then they were challenged to take it to the outside world, advocating for change in some way.

On a Saturday morning, Eva Rocheleau and teammate Fiona Nelson arrived at U-32 High School in East Montpelier to lead a workshop at the Queer and Allied Youth Summit, organized by the nonprofit organization Outright Vermont. After showing “Breaking Binary,” their 10-minute film, Rocheleau explained to a classroom of high schoolers drawn from around the state the difference between first-order and second-order change.

“First order is something you can change really easily,” she said. “Second-order change might take a team of people. It might take months or years.”

She asked, “What tactics have you seen that have worked, when you want to make change?” Noting answers and ideas on a whiteboard, she asked about identifying change makers to talk with. How do you set up a conversation? What can make it a success?

A few days later, another presentation’s setting could hardly be more different. It was the monthly meeting of the Hancock Fire Department. In a small room behind the parked fire engines, 10 company members sat around a table in sweatshirts, flannel shirts, and ball caps. Brennan Bordonaro and teammate Brynna Kearns, also a sophomore at Middlebury Union, presented their film on the emergency dispatch cuts.

“We spent about eight months doing research,” Bordonaro told the firefighters. “The consolidation isn’t the biggest issue—it’s communication between departments when there is an emergency.”

There were some questions, some discussion. Then one firefighter said, “You did a good job.”

“Yeah—you did an excellent job,” added the chief, Jacques Veilleux, before razzing his fellow volunteer firefighter. “I take it the other three did all the work?” Bordonaro smiled. He didn’t have to say that he had, in fact, worked very hard.

***

Nearing the point of no return, the team with an interest in solar power found a late focus: net-zero homes, which produce as much energy as they consume. They finished their project just in time, though Indigo Woods, a Middlebury Union High School junior who wound up working by herself on the project’s website, wasn’t sure they’d make it.

“Different members had different ideas about how to approach the project, and what the topic should be,” Indigo said. “Sometimes it didn’t seem like we were all on the same page…but in the end, we did pull it together. And I think I learned a lot about working with people.”

Alex Bickart had a similar thought. “Beyond high school, if you’re doing a project with someone it’s not going to be a four-day thing—you’re going to be working with these people for months. It was really useful to figure out how that works.”

In late May, Tim O’Leary, the Bread Loaf alumnus who is the project’s lead teacher, turned his ninth-grade classroom at Middlebury Union over to Ella Nagy-Benson, a local tenth grader whose team’s project focused on Act 77, the Flexible Pathways Initiative. Her goal was partly to spark interest among the ninth graders in joining “What’s the Story?” next year.

“It never feels like school when you’re working on your project because you’re working on something you care about, and you’re treated more like an adult,” Nagy-Benson told them after showing her team’s film. A shy, slender Nordic skier, lacrosse player, and classical pianist, Nagy-Benson said that her participation in the course had helped her grow more confident.

“At the beginning,” Nagy-Benson told the class, “you don’t think you could do something like that, but you’re forced to step out of your comfort zone. If you’re looking to get more out of your education, I would strongly recommend ‘What’s the Story?’”

Nobody responded. There were no questions, and no one signed up. Later, O’Leary reflected on why.

“These are ninth graders—I’m pretty sure they’ve never before been invited into a conversation about their own learning.” What seems to work better, he said, is to identify a student who seems like a prospect, as Alex Bickart had been identified, then have a talk with him or her.

“So much of what we do is to give students a means of creating agency,” O’Leary said. “I think in the nature of that individual conversation, the student can see themselves as an individual.”

As the school year ended, Dixie Goswami wrote in an email that the project is “making waves and making history.” A retired professor—at Clemson and Bread Loaf—who never seems retired at all, Goswami directs the nationwide Bread Loaf Teacher Network; she’s its lead promoter of new ideas and projects.

“One way it’s making history,” she wrote, “is by giving learning opportunities and agency to young people who don’t have private resources, to do these things that are quite routine in elite institutions. The other way is by demonstrating what you can do as a member of a network that includes Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf School of English, with local communities and with schools that include economically diverse populations, forming a network that works.

“That’s a model for liberal education all over this country.”

***

With summer vacation a few days away, Ben Krahn, the English teacher at Middlebury Union High School, opened a desk drawer in his classroom, lifted out a stack of term papers, and dropped them back in with a thunk.“The paper a student writes: it goes to us and that’s it,” he said. “These videos, like ‘Breaking Binary’: the most powerful audience for these is other students.”

Among the 21 students who showed up for the project’s first September gathering, only one dropped out. All the rest passed. “In September, they were deer in the headlights,” Krahn recalled, “and when we finished in May, the kids had ownership. Of everything.”

“What’s the Story?” may not be right for every student, Krahn said, but “I think the balance of this and the traditional course could be a real model. ‘What’s the Story?’ doesn’t replace everything—but it gives kids practice in certain skills that you get in the traditional classroom, but you get better in a project like this.”

Krahn and his wife, Courtney, a teacher at the local middle school, met as Bread Loaf grad students; now they’re parenting two preschoolers, and they both spend the school year juggling the unceasing demands on teachers today. Courtney Krahn shared a note she had received from a student she worked with, in both her regular classroom and through “What’s the Story?”

“You have one of the hardest and most underappreciated jobs in the world,” wrote middle schooler Emily Pecsok. “After seeing how much you impacted my life, I realized I really want to become a teacher so maybe one day I can help a student in the same ways you helped me.”

To Courtney Krahn, that note said something important—and it wasn’t about her. “I think this letter speaks to how deeply students crave meaningful, intelligent and social connections,” she wrote in a follow-up email. “Because we spent time in carpools and conference calls together; because we worked together in real environments—coffee shops, public libraries; because we existed on equal playing fields; and because our work was real, she suddenly felt a different connection.

“In an educational world where sticky notes cover my desk, Common Core standards are noted on all handouts, and I’m tasked with juggling the role of teacher, nutritionist, nurse, parent, therapist and disciplinarian in the span of an 80-minute English class, there is something sacred to be found at the heart of ‘What’s the Story?’”

As he speaks of life in retirement, John Elder’s voice brims with serene delight. His students and colleagues have come to recognize this note as a hallmark of the man, both inside and outside of classrooms, during his four decades at the College. Whether leading a discussion or a hike, sharing ideas or food, reciting poems or playing a game of Go, he radiates a sense of equanimity and zest.

In conversations we’ve shared over the course of 30 years, I’ve noticed how often John begins a sentence by saying, “It’s interesting.” He uses the phrase often, this summer of 2016, as he answers questions about his life. “You know, it’s interesting,” he tells me, “how many of my greatest blessings have arrived seemingly by chance.” The blessing he mentions first is his wife, Rita, whom he met in the choir at Pomona College, where both were undergraduates.

We are sitting in his study, in the zero-net-energy house that he and Rita arranged to have built for their retirement, in the town of Bristol, 12 miles from Middlebury. John has folded his six-foot-two frame into a chair flanked by stacks of books, letters, news clippings weighted down by a granite cobble, and yellow legal pads inscribed with his minuscule script. A faint smile reveals his amusement at being interviewed by an old friend. As he ponders his responses, which emerge in shapely paragraphs, he gazes across the room, his eyes the blue-green of ocean.

The walls display tokens of his past and current passions—broadsides of poems by Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry, a sheet of Japanese calligraphy, an Ansel Adams photograph of Yosemite Valley, three banjos. A map of the nearby town of Starksboro, where the Elder family tends a sugarbush, hangs next to a map of Connemara, in western Ireland, where John and Rita have gone exploring in recent years. A meditation mat rests on the floor, a book about mysticism on the desk.

This super-insulated new house, with 30 solar panels on the roof and an electric car in the garage, is only a few blocks away from the handsome, drafty, largely wood-heated Victorian where John and Rita reared their three children. They had hoped to live out their days in that beloved old house, but then Rita was diagnosed with an illness that would, over time, make the many stairs and narrow hallways a challenge. So they decided to build an accessible home to accommodate her needs. “And my eventual needs, as well,” John adds, rubbing his knees, which have carried him on thousands of miles of walks and runs.

The move into a sun-powered, handicap-friendly house is one in a sequence of postretirement surprises that John describes in Picking Up the Flute, his captivating memoir of this new phase in married life. The book’s title alludes to another of the surprises—learning to play Irish music with Rita, she on a concertina, he on a wooden flute. Each chapter of the memoir features a reel, jig, or other traditional tune—all of which can be heard, performed by John, on his website: www.johnelderauthor.com.

These lively, haunting tunes are only the latest genre of music that John and Rita have shared. Both were classically trained, she on the piano and he on the French horn, and both considered attending a conservatory. Instead, each eventually chose to pursue a degree in liberal arts—which was how they wound up singing together at Pomona College.

“I planned to study philosophy,” John recalls, “but I took a class with a wonderful English professor, who drew me into the field in which I’ve spent the rest of my life. That’s one of those blessings that came to me by chance. I met the right teacher at the right moment.”

As a doctoral student at Yale, John was guided by another gifted teacher, Charles N. Feidelson Jr., his thesis director. “He modeled for me how to be a scholar who reads literature for insight into human existence.”

On completing his PhD, instead of seeking a position at a research university, such as Yale, John applied to liberal arts colleges that resembled Pomona in focusing on undergraduate education. At the top of his list was Middlebury. So he gladly accepted an invitation to join the faculty there in the fall of 1973, and he stayed until his retirement in 2010. During those years he served stints as chair of English and director of environmental studies, taught regularly in the Bread Loaf School of English, pioneered community-based courses, published a series of important books, and rose through the ranks to become Stewart Professor and finally College Professor. The latter title, which entailed no departmental affiliation, acknowledged the breadth of John’s teaching, writing, and service.

He had not expected to stay at Middlebury for his entire career. At first, he and Rita assumed that after a few years in Vermont they would return to California. They had both grown up in the Bay Area, where their families still lived. They had imprinted on the Western landscape, which made the Green Mountains seem humble, and they had been shaped by the cosmopolitan, freewheeling coastal culture, which made the ways of New England seem guarded.

But after moving to the neighborly town of Bristol, joining community groups, and shepherding three children through school, they came to feel at ease among Vermonters. They also came to appreciate the surrounding landscape, with its richly layered human and natural history. From their house they could hike into mountains crisscrossed with tumbled stone walls and pockmarked with cellar holes from vanished farms, yet wild enough to harbor black bears and bobcats. A steep, forested ridge, visible from their back door, would earn official designation as the Bristol Cliffs Wilderness Area.

Over time, John came to see Vermont, along with much of New England, as a “recovering wilderness,” where cleared fields, long abandoned, had reverted to woods, and long-absent wildlife had returned—not only bears and bobcats but also moose, coyotes, and catamounts. He traces these discoveries about his adopted place in Reading the Mountains of Home. This is perhaps the finest of his dozen books, in the way it braids together history, science, indigenous lore, family stories, and tributes to the literature that has shaped his understanding.

The earliest of those literary influences was the Bible, which his father, a Baptist minister, read aloud at the dinner table. “I loved the King James Bible,” John tells me. “It was so much livelier than what we were reading in school. The stories were so juicy, the language so intriguing.” In The Frog Run, a personal narrative that ranges from discovering Zen to harvesting maple syrup, he reports that “Scriptures like the Psalms grounded my earliest spiritual experiences, inspired my first love of reading, and enhanced my appreciation of the natural world.”

Another early influence was Henry David Thoreau. “In high school I became fascinated by wilderness,” John says. “I went to the library and read all the Sierra Club books, with their gorgeous photos. They kindled in me a reverence for nature that was an extension of my reverence for the Bible. Then at 15, I was given a copy of Walden,and it came as a revelation. It opened me to the American nature writing tradition, which I have explored ever since.”

One fruit of that exploration is The Norton Book of Nature Writing, which John coedited with essayist Robert Finch. This pioneering anthology has helped to foster a vigorous field of research and teaching. Two years after the first edition appeared, and partly through its influence, a group of scholars and writers founded the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. John has served on the organization’s board ever since, including one term as president, while membership grew to some 1,500, drawn from 30 countries.

In addition to Thoreau and his American successors, John counts among his literary guides the classical authors of the pastoral tradition, such as Ovid and Virgil, as well as the English Romantics, especially Wordsworth, and Japanese haiku masters such as Bashō. But no writer has had a deeper impact on his reading of landscape than Robert Frost. During the latter decades of his life, the celebrated poet spent part of every year just up the road from Middlebury, in the village of Ripton, near the Bread Loaf campus. From that vantage, he observed nature and people with an eye “versed in country things”—to borrow a phrase from one of his poems—and recorded his findings in memorable verse.

“Another of my blessings,” John says, “is to live in a place that has been brought into art by a great writer.” He knows much of Frost by heart, including the long, profound poem “Directive,” which frames the sequence of hikes recounted in Reading the Mountains of Home. “Reflecting about this poem,” John explains in the introduction, “has helped me understand how the mountains around our home assumed their present form, as well as what it might mean to identify with such a place on earth.”

As John and Rita came to identify with their adopted home in Vermont, the notion of moving back to California faded away. Of all the inducements for staying, the ones John mentions most often are the rewards of teaching at Middlebury, especially the chance to work with inquisitive, idealistic students. “I felt so well suited, and so well supported, in my work at the College,” he says. Within this “community of learners,” he was free to follow his intellectual path wherever it led—to nature writing and environmental studies, to coteaching with scientists, to leading classes on Vermont’s Long Trail or local farms, to studying Japanese and spending a sabbatical in Kyoto, to directing Bread Loaf programs in New Mexico and Alaska.

“Unlike so many New England colleges,” he notes, “Middlebury wasn’t founded by a church but by a town, with the intention of educating youth to lead meaningful and useful lives.” Judging by emails sent to me by a few of his former students, John has fulfilled that purpose splendidly.

“Unconditional love is a strong current that runs through John’s teaching,” writes Byron Rath ’10, who took a course with John entitled Farm Stories. “There’s something about his love for literature and teaching that’s renewing.” Rath moved to Vermont from rural Missouri, and often felt out of place among students from big cities and private schools, but through John’s class, he recalls, “I came to understand my upbringing as a strength.” Studying the writing of Wendell Berry and other agrarians gave him a sense of purpose, which has led him to his current position with the Soil Health Institute, a nonprofit devoted to stewardship of the world’s fertile land.

After graduating from Middlebury, Alvin Ung ’94 returned to his native Malaysia, where he works as a consultant in leadership development. During his first year at the College he felt lost, and might have left, had he not found a mentor. “John saw something in me that I did not see in myself,” Ung writes. He was astounded when this celebrated professor agreed to direct his senior thesis. “Most of the time he left me breathless—literally—because he had this habit of asking me to walk the trails near the College while discussing my drafts. He remembered the rickety structure of my papers and he proposed revisions while he named the trees around us. He himself is a tree offering shade to many. Now I’m spending the rest of my life learning to live out his values.”

As a senior, Corinne Almquist ’09 took a class with John focusing on American food culture, which opened her eyes to the issue of malnutrition in poor communities. In her first year out of college, she created a gleaning program in Addison County to provide fresh, local food to low-income families. Now, as a midwife and women’s health nurse practitioner, she writes that “one of John’s greatest gifts is his ability to find the seed of an idea in his students and help nurture it to become something so much larger.” Having recently visited him, she is reminded that “even a 10-minute conversation with John makes the world feel more connected, more precious, and more replete with wonder.”

John Schubert ’80, recently retired from the U.S. Forest Service as a wilderness ranger, remembers taking John’s seminar called the Literature of Attentiveness to Nature. He writes, “Over the decades, I have often reflected that the example of John’s life inspired me to live a fuller, more sincere, generous, humor-filled and kinder life of my own. In short, simply who he is inspires me to be a better person.”

Another Forest Service veteran among John’s former students is Tom Van de Water ’83, who teaches high school science in the Adirondacks during the academic year, and during the summer works as a fire lookout in Idaho. “From my freshman seminar at Middlebury to my senior thesis,” he writes, “John shaped the direction of my life. He modeled how to read closely, listen, question, pay attention to detail, and work hard with a sincerity and love that encouraged, inspired, and awed us.” Van de Water remembers going on a 10-mile charity run with John, talking the whole way, and also remembers bicycling to the Elders’ house in Bristol, where Rita would greet him with a warm bowl of soup.

At the beginning of a course entitled A Portrait of a Vermont Town, Aylie Baker ’09 recalls, John told the students “we were doing something that hadn’t been done before, and he didn’t know how it would turn out.” It turned out quite well. Through interviews and storytelling, they learned about the community of Starksboro and helped the residents achieve a deeper sense of place.She came away with the feeling that “if we listen deeply enough we might catch the echoes of a past place and time and begin to understand how it resonates into the present. Through this process I think we all learned that it matters where we direct our listening and who we listen to.” Today, as a graduate teaching fellow at the University of Oregon, she credits that experience with stoking her interest in community storytelling.

Harrison Hobart, MA English ’12, who left a business career in his middle years to become a teacher, studied with John at the Bread Loaf School of English. He writes that “John adeptly applied the tools of a master teacher: the clear-minded capacity to listen and understand each student and a literary fluency born of a deep immersion and personal engagement—and fostered them in us. I experienced more healing and growth in that summer than at any other time in my life. Never have I been so encouraged to put as much of myself, my best, courageous, and chastened self into the world.”

To suggest John’s impact on past and current colleagues, one example must suffice. Amy Seidl, who teaches now at the University of Vermont, began her career at Middlebury. “I saw how much John loved—a term I believe he would use—the study of the environment. He loved thinking about it historically, politically, and literarily,” she writes. “This holistic and truly loving view is one I try to emulate.”

***

Ironically, the very intensity of John’s engagement with students helped prompt his decision to retire at the relatively early age of 63. After graduating, many students keep in touch with him, and some become lifelong friends. He recommends them for jobs and graduate programs; attends their weddings, concerts, and plays; reads their manuscripts; and faithfully answers their letters, emails, and phone calls. “While I treasure every one,” he explains, “I felt I had all the former students my life could hold. I retired early out of a desire to encounter this next phase in my life actively. I liked the idea of drawing a line, stepping over it, and seeing what might be on the other side.”

In what he calls the “spacious world of retirement” he has found much of interest. Not only the adventure of building a house and playing Irish music but also doing carpentry with twin grandsons, celebrating the birth of a third grandson, watching his three children flourish in their careers, studying Spanish and ancient Chinese philosophy, carving wooden spoons, baking bread, and memorizing more poetry. He regularly offers courses in a Bristol initiative called Hogback Community College. “It’s neighbors teaching neighbors,” he says. “We share our knowledge with one another.” John’s own classes have included an evening session on Emily Dickinson at the bakery and a several-day writing workshop at a conserved forest in town.

He has undertaken these ventures out of the same desire that led him to regularly create new courses at Middlebury and to survey the mountains of Vermont. One of his favorite Zen aphorisms says, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” With characteristic modesty, he says, “I am a very good beginner, but only a middling achiever. I love launching into new activities.” While his memory does not grasp Irish tunes as quickly as it once grasped classical music, and his fingers are not as supple on the flute as they were on the French horn, and his back is not as fit for splitting wood or his legs for clambering over rough trails as they were when he was a young man, he perseveres in walking, sugaring, making music, and following every other path of discovery. Along with his new activities, John continues the spiritual search that led him from a Southern Baptist upbringing to conscientious objection during the Vietnam War, then to Quakerism, Zen Buddhism, and contemplative traditions of East and West. He continues to serve on the Bristol Planning Commission and on the boards of Sterling College and Vermont Family Forests. The Elders’ own family forest is the 142-acre sugarbush they call Maggie Brook, where three generations harvest Earth’s sweetness.

***

Earlier in this record-hot summer of 2016, at a reading from Picking Up the Flute, John told the audience: “Our forests are changing under the stress of global warming. As temperatures rise, sugar maples may not be able to regenerate. Animals and plants will be forced to move farther north, or some will disappear entirely. So I often feel grief when I think about the future of this land. But if you love a place or a person, and they fall ill, you don’t love them the less. In fact, you love them more.” His words contained a truth applicable to any place or person, but one could sense that the person he had chiefly in mind was Rita, and the place was his Vermont home ground.

“Grace, as our ancestors affirmed, is ultimately what sustains every good thing in our lives,” he declares in Reading the Mountains of Home. When I quote this passage to him, he remarks, “I’ve been criticized for using words such as grace and sacred in my writing, but I refuse to give them up, because they point to things that are of utmost importance. I do believe in grace. I don’t have the theology to justify it, but I think we receive gifts from the universe.” Surely John is one such gift—for his family and friends, his colleagues, his readers, and above all his students.

“Though writing remains for me such an engrossing practice,” he says, “teaching has always been my main calling.” What has he most enjoyed about his vocation? He smiles, remembering. “A class begins as a collection of individuals. But then, as you explore ideas and texts together, a moment comes when everyone cares about everyone else’s learning, and a community forms. One can feel it happening—a kind of liftoff, as if we’re taking flight together, all singing the same tune. Together, we achieve understanding that none of us could achieve in isolation. In those moments, teaching is bliss.”

Laurie Patton is no longer a new president. That designation came to a symbolic end on July 1, the beginning of her second year occupying the chief executive’s office on the third floor of Old Chapel. But she stopped seeming like a new president well before that. Was it when she presided over Middlebury’s 215th Commencement in May? Or when she welcomed alumni to campus in June? Or did her newness gradually fade over the course of her first year as she stepped into the classroom to guest lecture for colleagues? As she expertly presided over community conversations, large and small? As she crisscrossed the country and the oceans getting to know alumni who, in her words, are “responsible for building this place that I love so much”?

Honestly, it doesn’t matter when Patton ceased to be a new president. What matters is that she now has the perspective to discuss what it means to be president of this institution, and the experience to understand how it is shaping her and she it.

Over two long interviews in her Old Chapel office—the first in July and the second in September—supplemented with shorter conversations and through email exchanges in the intervening months, Patton spoke with Middlebury Magazine about the challenges of the job, the evolution of higher education and liberal learning, and what a future Middlebury may look like. This interview has been edited and condensed for publication.

Middlebury is a very different institution today from the one many alumni experienced as recently as 10 or 15 years ago. How has our growth changed the nature of what it means to be
Middlebury’s president?

A new insight I’ve developed over the past year is that a president has to decide in any given moment—of conversation, of decision making—whether we’re big or we’re small, and whether the value is to be big or small. So when it comes to efficiency of systems, we need to think like a more complex institution, and we are getting there. The “small” has to do with the values that we share—how we make decisions, how we communicate. I don’t mean the systems of communication—they need to assume complexity—but rather the tone of communication, so I think those are all more village-type values that also make a difference.

What challenges does this present?

We need to be careful that we don’t undergo mission creep, which is a difficult thing for a complex institution. It’s one of our biggest challenges—that everything will be relevant to us. We also have to stay confident about the fact that we don’t look like a traditional liberal arts college and we don’t look like a traditional university. We are neither.Most people, even traditional folks and Middlebury folks from 50 years ago, really like the idea of Middlebury as a newly complex institution. I think even in the DNA from 50 years ago—having spent time last summer with the Class of ’66—there’s a real excitement about that. There’s real engagement and there’s an expectation that new complexity will yield positive results. However, there’s also some anxiety about it, and as a president, you have to manage that as well.

I’m curious to know your opinion on why issues of race and inclusivity blossomed across the higher ed landscape last year?

I believe that Ferguson and other events around police profiling and police treatment of people of color sparked it. A lot of the events on the national scale heightened what was already there on campuses, and it allowed students to push on certain kinds of agendas of inclusion that they may not have been so activist around in the past. I think that’s number one. Number two, I believe it was a tipping point for things that had been building on campuses, and what we are seeing in higher education is a place where we created numerical inclusivity but were not as aware of the systems of support that we needed to put into place to really manage that, and there are any number of models.

I think one of the hardest things about this issue is that there’s no quick fix . . .

I agree, I don’t think there’s one single answer to how you build inclusivity on campus. You just can’t be competitive around every single metric. I believe that would be an ill-advised way to move forward. I do think that it would be incredibly important to make sure that each campus’s approach to inclusivity is true to its character and true to its values. So with Middlebury, we are of course far more diverse than we were even 20 years ago, and certainly 30 years ago. We continue to be more diverse partly because that’s a value for me. However, I’ve said on a number of different occasions I don’t think that fixating on numbers is the right thing. What I am going to fixate on is making sure that we have the support systems in place for the folks that are here, including building on things we’re doing right now.

This fall, you’ve spoken about teaching students to become resilient in the public sphere, even giving this skill a name: rhetorical resilience . . .

It’s both a skill and a disposition, and if we are to live up to our educational mission, it’s incumbent upon us to cultivate this ethic. To do so, we need to figure out how to make our public spaces more inclusive of everyone and to have these spaces be the place for rigorous, constructive, free speech.

How do you move from saying you want to do this to putting it into action?

Well, as long as I’m here, I want to have arguers come together. I want a team of arguers who are committed to each other, who love to argue, who are colleagues, to show students how to engage in typical conversations across difference. It’s an important value for us, and I want to become the place where students really learn how to have those tough conversations. I think we will be able to do that. I’m pushing for constructive debate. I don’t even care if it’s civil, as long as it’s constructive.

I firmly believe that we have the DNA to make this happen. Many Middlebury students are already there, but can we be even more like that? Can we make it an explicit value? That’s where I really want to take it.

Well, from one hard topic to another to another: financial sustainability. What are our challengesas an institution and what are we doing to meet these challenges?

The simple answer is that we’re spending more than we’re taking in. And so, over the next five years we are committed to achieving a new level of financial sustainability. It’s a big project, it’s a hard project, and we have to execute on it. It’s our number one challenge right now, but it’s important to keep in mind that it’s not a crisis. So how do you create an ethos of fiscal efficiency and discipline when it’s not a crisis? How do you create that discipline that we simply need for the future?

The plan we’ve created, with the support of the Board of Trustees, uses several different levers to both hold costs flat in a number of different areas while making sure that our focus on income generation and fundraising remains as aggressive as it can possibly be.

And I must state the obvious: we must do this in a way that is consistent with our values.

On the fundraising front, you identified three top priorities for your first year: financial aid, annual giving, and the president’s discretionary fund. How did you settle on those and what is our outlook for fundraising?

Well, to begin with, financial aid—or what I prefer to call student funding with purpose—represents a core value for Middlebury and for me personally. Annual giving directly supports the essential operations of the institution. And the president’s discretionary fund supports the innovation we must pursue as an institution to continue to thrive.

That strict focus on three priorities has created some difficult conversations on campus about other priorities, but we agreed to stay focused, and I’m pleased to say that we surpassed our goals in all three fundraising areas last year.

I believe that people have seen that the discipline of sticking to those three things and continuing to do so over the next couple of years is important.

Shifting gears a bit, could you describe the working relationship you’ve developed with the undergraduate faculty over the past year?

I think the Middlebury faculty is extraordinary. It wasn’t a surprise in any way, but some things stand out. I have experienced them as ready to work, ready to engage, ready to think in new and innovative ways.

I find them all very much aware of the changes that are happening in higher education. Of course they have different opinions about it. As one example, we had a tough discussion around how to change our civilization requirement this year. We had really good, open debate, we had a vote, and we went forward with a significant change. I’ve seen that same attitude on a couple of smaller initiatives as well.

So I’ve been impressed with the way faculty have responded to our new governance system, the way they’ve responded to me as a president, as well as to the style that I’m trying to create for leadership. I can’t say enough good things about our faculty.

You bring up the changes that are happening in higher education. The liberal arts have always evolved, in some way, with the times. How do you see a liberal arts education evolving during the next decade?

You know, I think there are three key concepts at play when talking about the evolution of the liberal arts: integration, adaptation, and innovation. Integration speaks to a student’s capacity to find a place for her knowledge in the world; adaptation is the ability to “turn on a dime” in response to a new environment; and innovation is understanding when to ask a new question and how to implement the answer in an effective way. All three of these areas are both skills and dispositions and require a certain kind of creativity and humility as well as courage.

I think the creative questions that Middlebury students have always been trained to ask will be at the front and center of our next decade, but with a twist. The students of the future will need to operate in the digital world where interactive databases and artificial intelligence—the likes of which we’ve never seen—will be facets of everyday life. And they will also need to comprehend urgent environmental challenges, challenges that already are altering life on this planet. And I think they will be comfortable working in collaborative environments. Students of the future are going to need to tackle these challenges in groups, not alone.

OK, so, getting more granular, if we’re projecting 10 years out, for students entering the marketplace—both of ideas and employment—in 2026, what skills will they need to succeed?

Well, this era can no longer be defined simply as postindustrial. We’re entering a cognitive age, where knowledge and the service economy are at the center of what we do. So students will need digital skills, communication skills, and team skills. If they’re going to thrive in this environment, they’re going to need to be familiar with complexity, with neuroscience, with data analytics. But—and this is important—that doesn’t mean that disciplines such as history or philosophy or the traditional sciences become less relevant. They become more relevant because we need to look at the past in order to study the future; we need ethics and epistemology even more than before if we care to remain curious and creative in this new era.

You made a face when you said the word “relevant.”

[Laughs] I’ve never liked that word, because ultimately it’s not adaptive. If a conference in Delhi on early-Indian history now requires bodyguards because that moment in history has become so essential to a nation’s identity, does that mean that same scholarship was irrelevant during times when such security was not needed? Knowledge is always relevant; when we lock on to a restrictive idea of relevance, then we’re unable to adapt when we need to do so.

And this comes back to the notion of integration that you talked about before.

Exactly. These new methods of learning and these new areas of discovery can be integrated into traditional liberal arts education in some wonderful ways. I’ve never really thought of liberal arts as “traditional” in the sense that they should always focus on “what we’ve always done.” Rather, liberal learning should make all of us permanently and joyfully uncomfortable, and permanently and joyfully restless. That’s because we’ve become curious for the rest of our lives.

So how do we, as an institution, plan for this? Envisioning Middlebury—this year of conversation we’re having about the future of the institution—obviously seems like the first step.

I think that the Envisioning Middlebury process continues to be at its core a strategic planning process, but I think what’s exciting about it is that for the first time everybody’s voice will matter and everybody’s voice includes the undergraduate college, Monterey, the Language Schools, Schools Abroad, School of the Environment, and Bread Loaf. There’s a lot of energy in the Schools Abroad, too, in all of those arenas, and I think that people are beginning to interact more and see how they could work with each other while maintaining their separate identities. And so we have the good groundwork for this kind of highly consultative strategic planning process.

The other thing that was a wonderful pivot that we made about six months ago is that we’re not going to be creating a long list of to-dos for our strategic plan. We’re going to have six or seven strategic directions that people can then envision themselves in and propose their own strategic planning underneath those directions.

I really want those directions not to be business as usual. I want us to frame them in a way that wakes everybody up, and I’m very committed to that; what that looks like, we don’t know yet. I have my own idea of where we want to go, but I am articulating that through questions so that the process is not simply performative. My role is more like a head coach of this project, and I think that Susan Baldridge, our provost, has done a really wonderful job of keeping it on track and keeping people excited and engaged.

Middlebury just hired a new dean for spiritual and religious life. With data showing that college students are becoming increasingly secular, what is his role on campus?

I think the two biggest trends that religious life professionals face in higher education today are the students who self-identify as having no religious ties and students who are interested in interfaith work.

The so-called “Nones” cover a wide range of experiences—some have left a childhood tradition, others have never had one, and then there are those who are actively committed to a secular humanist perspective. Our team at Middlebury is prepared to address both those who come from traditional backgrounds as well as those who don’t have affiliation but who are seekers, who are interested in a spiritual grounding to their lives without necessarily building that grounding through a traditional structure of religious authority.

And the interfaith work . . .

We’ve already seen it at Middlebury with groups such as MOSAIC (Middlebury Organization Supporting All Identities and Cultures), and I expect we’ll see even more in the years ahead. And it’s happening on campuses across the country. I run a national workshop for liberal arts college professors in this area with the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago, and it’s phenomenal to watch the dynamism in these new interfaith models emerging.

When I think of interfaith work, I think of people of different faiths coming together for the greater good of a community . . .

I think that’s perhaps the most common application, this service-and-conversation model that campus religious professionals use to facilitate both greater understanding of different cultures and shared purposes.

And this ties in, again, to the idea of knowledge; I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t believe that more knowledge should make you a better person. Being literate in religious traditions is important if one is to have a comprehensive understanding of how the world works. But let’s take this further. What’s the ethical element of religious literacy? Does our understanding of different religious faiths contribute to character building? Could one channel this understanding toward the creation of a civic space where people would not be deterred by differences but would find a sense of common purpose? You may never agree with someone else on certain topics, but could you still come together in this space to create something for the greater good?

On this and other topics, I’m wondering about our location in rural Vermont. It seems like we’re seeing a youth culture that is increasingly urbanized and a society that is focused on urban areas for innovation and creative thinking. What are the challenges and advantages of a four-year residential experience in a small town in northern New England?

I think that Middlebury’s commitment to the environment and its spectacular setting will always make it a place that people are drawn to. But we also need to think differently about college towns like Middlebury, which is both a rural community and a cosmopolitan one. I think interactions between town and gown are even more important than ever, because we are interlocked and interdependent in so many important ways. I have focused in the last year on the ways in which the town and college can collaborate on a common education purpose—funding internships in arts organizations, for example.

I also think that the urban/suburban/rural divides are a great way to frame the conversations across difference that all colleges are challenged by these days. We just had a vibrant orientation for first-generation students—and what I loved about it is that you had students from Brooklyn, South Side Chicago, Los Angeles, intermingling with students from suburban Connecticut and farm communities in Iowa and Wisconsin. It was tremendous to be a part of, and the conversations were partly about differences of race and ethnicity, but they were also about the rural/urban/suburban experience. That’s inspiring.

Speaking of culture change, when you moved to Vermont, you joined a new community. But joining the community wasn’t your only new
experience. As a college president, you are experiencing a community in a way that is very different than one experienced by a dean or a professor. What has that change been like?

That’s a great question. The community of alumni and trustees are the biggest constituents that a president has that are different than a professor or a dean. I did have a lot of contact with alumni as a dean, but it wasn’t as the chief executive, so I didn’t have the same sense of obligation to them. I think about alumni as the people to whom I should be grateful for building the Middlebury I have already come to love.

I think of the trustees as deeply accomplished and insightful friends of the community who have chosen to give their time and energy to Middlebury when they could be doing a thousand other things. I count on them for advice, almost every day. And because I am also a trustee, I think about the way we can be a collegial and diverse group whose fiduciary responsibilities are carried out with joy and inspiration. And I’ve found the response has been phenomenal.

Last question: Speaking frankly, how do you deal with everyone in town knowing who you are? With everyone seeing you through the
filter of “president”?

I love this question. For the most part, I find it fun. I don’t think of myself as an intimidating person, so there are times when I laugh because people are nervous when they come to the office or meet me for coffee. I tell them they can be nervous around the role, but not the person. Middlebury faculty, staff, and students have been responsive to a more informal everyday leadership style. And then when we move into a formal occasion such as Convocation, we can be more connected because we know each other on an everyday basis. I find that inspiring.

The only downside is what I call “the cauliflower effect.” On a rare day when I don’t have anything scheduled, and I feel like going to the store to buy ingredients to make my favorite cauliflower dish, it’s never a simple anonymous trip to the store. In addition to the warm greetings of hello, which I love, occasionally folks feel like they have the president’s ear in the checkout line and will bend it. Sometimes they’ll even be surprised that I am doing my own shopping and comment on my choice of cauliflower. But because I love the town of Middlebury, and love interacting with local businesses, I generally find it fun!

I’m making a note that if I ever see you in the grocery store, I will simply say, “Hi.”

[Laughs]

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/11/16/in-conversation-with-president-laurie-l-patton/feed/0noMiddlebury's 17th president reflects on the challenges of her job, the evolution of higher education and liberal learning, and what a future Middlebury may look like.Middlebury MagazineMiddlebury's 17th president reflects on the challenges of her job, the evolution of higher education and liberal learning, and what a future Middlebury may look like.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/11/16/in-conversation-with-president-laurie-l-patton/Why Do Americans Distrust Science?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/rM1PWjqSiMY/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/11/16/why-do-americans-distrust-science/#respondWed, 16 Nov 2016 16:54:31 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14715

On the late afternoon of October 6, as a Category 4 hurricane lumbered toward the southeast coast of Florida, conservative political commentator Matt Drudge sent a pair of messages to the 414,000 people who follow him on the social media app Twitter: “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate” and “Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims. Nassau ground observations DID NOT match statements! 165 mph gusts? WHERE?”

Earlier that afternoon, radio host Rush Limbaugh presaged the Drudge Report founder’s comments when he announced to his listening audience, “The National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service, which is part of the Commerce Department, which is part of the Obama administration, which by definition has been tainted just like the [Department of Justice] has…With hurricane tracking and hurricane forecasting, I’ve been able to spot where I think they might be playing games because it’s in the interests of the left to have destructive hurricanes because then they can blame it on climate change, which they desperately continue trying to sell.”

Limbaugh allowed that Matthew was a “serious storm,” and he was right. By the time the hurricane’s posttropical remains had been absorbed by a front that was moving across eastern Canada, it had been responsible for an estimated $5–7 billion in damage ($4–6 billion in the U.S. alone)—and 1,044 fatalities.

An estimated one thousand residents of Haiti died after the storm ravaged that island country—a day before Drudge implied that the American government was intentionally exaggerating the hurricane’s strength to score political points. And 38 Americans lost their lives as a result of the storm’s impact on coastal communities in the days that followed Matthew’s initial U.S. landfall—in the early morning hours of October 7.

Now, is Matt Drudge or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else who might have suggested that Hurricane Matthew’s strength was exaggerated by a government agency—for partisan political purposes—responsible for the deaths of American citizens? That’s both virtually impossible to know and equally as dangerous to suggest as the initial comments themselves.

What is not in doubt, though, is that the American public and American scientists have drifted far apart in their perception of vital scientific issues, and this disconnect poses a clear and present danger to an educated and engaged citizenry. And it’s important to note that this disconnect exists across the ideological spectrum; it is neither a conservative nor liberal, a Republican nor Democratic “war on science.”

We’re all complicit. Even the scientists themselves.

***

I hope you’re still reading this story. That is, I hope you didn’t stop because you saw this piece as an attack on conservative thought and beliefs. I hope you didn’t drop the magazine in disgust, decrying yet another example of a liberal bashing Republicans. But here’s the thing. You’d have a valid point. I chose to lead this story with an anecdote that conformed to my worldview—basically that people who don’t believe in anthropogenic climate change (or worse, people who actively seek to mislead the public) are inherently dangerous to mankind. I can obviously cite scientific consensus on the issue not only to bolster my point but to justify my decision to begin the story this way. But you know what? I could have also cited scientific consensus on another issue—whether it’s safe to eat genetically modified food—and chosen an anecdote involving GMOs, but I opted not to do so. I’d like to think that that is because, as a professional writer, I understand how to write a strong opening, and that when a recent event involving mass destruction and death sits within the context of the story topic, then focusing on that anecdote is an obvious solution. But you should know something. The GMO thing? My personal beliefs are in conflict with scientific consensus. That surprised the hell out of me, and, quite frankly, prompted me to be even more curious about why we, as a populace, see things differently than scientists do. (And that curiosity is a good thing, I would learn; more on that later.)

So let’s see if you’re as surprised as I was.

Like most U.S. adults, I believe that genetically modified foods are unsafe to eat; scientists believe otherwise. In a 2015 study conducted by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), just 37 percent of the general public said that it is safe to eat genetically modified foods. By contrast, 88 percent of AAAS scientists say that such foods are safe. And that 51-point gap? It’s the largest opinion difference between the public and scientists on any issue surveyed. It’s larger than the differences in opinions on whether humans have evolved over time (98–65 percent); whether childhood vaccines should be required (86–68 percent); whether climate change is mostly due to human activity (87–50 percent). (In all of these cases, scientists represent the higher numbers.)

So, you tell me: Should I have led with an anecdote about genetically modified food, since on no issue are scientists and the public further apart?

I guess that’s to be debated.

What really isn’t up for debate is the main takeaway from the Pew report, which is that “citizens and scientists often see science-related issues through different sets of eyes.”

I wanted to know why, so I turned to a psychologist, a philosopher, a political scientist, and a physicist to shed light on this issue.

***

Barbara Hofer seems to be a relatively laidback person—until she starts talking about a topic that she cares deeply about; then, she practically radiates energy. I met the psychology professor for coffee one morning in the Davis Library’s Wilson Café, and about halfway through our conversation about the public’s understanding of science—and the global implications therein—she stopped mid-sentence and declared: “I care about this so passionately.”

That’s why I was there talking to her, having read a journal article that she recently cowrote, in which she and her coauthor presented research on why the public was struggling to better understand science, why it matters, and what can be done about it.

We had started by talking about scientific literacy, what I had—somewhat erroneously, it turned out—thought of as simply being well-read about scientific issues.

“I don’t think anyone would argue that there is a need for improved science literacy,” Hofer told me. (On this issue, a vast majority of those surveyed by Pew seemed to agree. Nearly 80 percent of the public said science has made life easier for people, yet both the public and scientists were highly critical of science education in America. Just 29 percent of adults said it was above average, a figure that drops to 16 percent for scientists.) “But we need to be very careful about how we rely on this literacy and even how we define ‘literacy.’”

Hofer brought up a view that psychologists refer to as the “knowledge deficit”; that is, if you simply acquire knowledge about an issue, you’ll understand it better. (What I understood as being well-read.) “Then why aren’t we seeing greater acceptance of evolution and climate change?” On these issues, the public remains far removed from scientific consensus. While 97 percent of scientists believe that the earth is warming (and have produced studies showing this to be the case), a quarter of the public says there is no solid evidence. On evolution, 98 percent of scientists say that humans have evolved over time, while one-third of U.S. adults say we have existed in our present form since the beginning of time.

“Literacy can’t just be content,” she said. “It’s a fallacy to believe that if we just impart more facts then we’ll have done our jobs. The definition of scientific literacy needs to be thought of as an understanding of the very nature of science itself and how it is conducted.”

She added: “So much of what we are encountering is a failure to understand the epistemology of the issue.”

(A quick note: If you’ve been out of the classroom for a while, it’s possible that the word epistemology rings a bell, but its definition escapes you. It means the study of the nature of knowledge; an epistemologist is one who studies how we know what we know. Both Hofer and her colleague in philosophy, Heidi Grasswick, whom I interviewed for this piece, speak often about epistemology, so I thought it best to offer this refresher.)

“One of the fundamental tenets of the scientific method is that knowledge is always open to revision. That’s how you produce solid science, science that is durable,” she said. Indeed, she makes this very point in her journal article, writing “scientists work toward increasingly accurate approximations to describe phenomena in the world and revise them as new information becomes available, usually through modification.”

And people can have a problem with an absence of absolute certainty. Hofer talks about epistemic cognition, basically how people think about reason and knowledge. The absolutist stance, where one holds a dualistic view that you are either right or wrong based on knowledge that is certain, is perhaps the most problematic dimension when it comes to scientific understanding, Hofer said. (For instance, I’ve spoken to someone who told me he was withholding judgment on climate change until scientists had reached 100 percent consensus.) This might explain why, according to the Pew report, at least a third of the populace believes that scientists do not agree that the Earth is getting warmer or humans evolved over time, despite the fact that 97 and 98 percent, respectfully, believe it to be true.

There is also a multiplistic stance in epistemic cognition, in which knowledge is based on interpretation and belief without clear criteria “for ascertaining the truth value of a claim.” About five years ago, Hofer conducted a study with Middlebury first-year students, gauging their attitudes toward evolution. She was stunned to learn that one-third of those students applied the colloquial definition of theory to scientific theory, stating that it meant one person’s opinion. Further, “a surprising number of students thought we should teach intelligent design right alongside evolution—even if they believed in evolution—so that people could ‘make up their own minds’ in the issue. This floored me. Science is not a belief system, it’s a method of investigation,” she said in describing an extreme instance of multiplistic cognition as applied to scientific understanding.

And then there is the evaluativist view, what Hofer described as an integration of objectivity and subjectivity, an appreciation for the relative nature of certainty, and a recognition that knowledge is contingent and contextual.

“But even then you need to be epistemically vigilant,” she said. “Students and the public need to understand where the biases are. They need to understand how to critically evaluate claims and studies.”

They need to know whom and how to trust. And when it comes to epistemic trust, there are few, if any, people on the Middlebury campus who have thought more about this than philosophy professor Heidi Grasswick.

***

“I am an epistemologist, first and foremost,” Grasswick told me one day over lunch. “And I love thinking about not just what counts as knowledge, and what we do as individuals, as knowers, but how the circulation of knowledge is itself a philosophical issue. We’re dependent on others for knowledge, and not just experts, but us, here, talking.”

(As an example, she asked me what my birthday was. When I told her, she asked how I knew. “You don’t actually know that on your own,” she said, smiling slyly. “You’re depending on other people to tell you something as personal and individual as when you were born.”)

Grasswick said that testimony has become a more prevalent topic in epistemology during the past few decades, which drew her toward the epistemology of trust. “For us to depend on other people,” she said, “we’re going to need to have some sort of grounding in trust, and not just trust in information, but also trust in a relationship.”

Grasswick is the George Nye and Anne Walker Boardman Professor of Mental and Moral Science at Middlebury, and she says that philosophical reflections on “the repercussions of how society thinks about itself, how people think about themselves, and how any shift in knowledge might lead to a shift in practice” have always fascinated her.

Last January, she gave her inaugural lecture as the forenamed professor, a talk titled “In Science We Trust!—Or Not? Developing a Situated Account of Responsible Trust in Scientific Experts.” (It was this talk that initially turned me on to this subject as a potential story.)

“Scientists are often surprised or dismayed when their work is met with distrust or rejection by members of the general public,” she said then. “As far as they are concerned, they are engaged in the most robust form of knowledge generation available. They are the experts on their topics, and it seems to follow that nonexperts should follow what they have to say. Furthermore, since sound policy making needs to be based on sound science, it’s deeply worrisome that trust in science is not widespread.”

“It is worrisome,” Grasswick told me, when I asked her about this statement. “But it’s not as simple as just saying, ‘Trust me.’”

To begin with, she said, there are legitimate, contemporary reasons why people may distrust scientists. Scientists have been wrong, she said, citing the devastating effects of thalidomide use among pregnant women in the 1950s; and they have behaved unethically, even criminally, such as with the 40-year clinical study in which the U.S. government studied the progression of untreated syphilis in African American men in the rural South—withholding a known cure for thirty years after the efficacy of penicillin was proven, all under the guise of receiving free health care.

“Entire communities, understandably, lose trust in the institution,” she said. “And there are two levels at which this impacts knowledge. The most obvious is that if I don’t have a reason to trust, then I’m going to miss out on that knowledge. And then there is the impact on knowledge generation, itself. If you have a group of scientists who have no input from those who are socially situated differently, you run a far greater risk of being influenced by biases.

“It’s the idea that you need to diversify your scientific community in order to be able to see some of the holes or the blind spots in your thinking,” she said. “No matter how good a scientist you are, you must start with an assumption; that’s part of the scientific method. But you also need people who see things differently. And then the scientists can work it out, and maybe some of the theories live and some die.”

I asked her about scientific literacy, and Grasswick echoed Hofer nearly word for word. “Knowing some basic facts that are understood as scientific facts is not going to help you all that much. If you are going to be literate in science, you need to have an essential understanding in how science works. And then you can discern what makes for a robust application of science versus a less robust application, and this builds trust.”

With this in mind, I asked Grasswick about the increased privatization and corporatization of scientific research and how one could be epistemically vigilant, as Hofer prescribes, in order to build trust in these institutions and, therefore, their results.

“I think it comes down to what we want to demand of these institutions, these companies, in order for us to say, ‘OK, we’ll give you our trust.’ I touched on this in my talk when I said that trust can come from a history of that party willingly circulating knowledge rather than hiding it from you,” she said. “And as soon as we find out that there has been information hidden or manipulated, then that itself takes away from our trust, as it should as reasonable beings.”

But what if we can’t be reasonable?

***

I sat down with political science professor Matt Dickinson the day after presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump met in their second debate, a clash the New York Times described as “unremittingly hostile,” and one that seemed to end with the populace agreeing on only one thing—at least democracy itself did not go up in flames on that autumn evening.

I hauled out my now dog-eared copy of the Pew report and asked him about the findings that showed that Democrats are more likely than either Independents or Republicans to say there is solid evidence of global warming or that more Democrats than Republicans disagree with scientific findings on the safety of genetically modified foods, and he offered a wan smile.

“The party sorting that has increasingly matched party labels with ideology has not helped the discourse,” he said. “It’s made it too easy for people to think that the opposing party is increasingly out of step with what one believes is right. And I think part of what’s happening is when a scientific consensus dovetails with a policy objective that resonates with one party more than the other, then that doesn’t help people appreciate the science.”

I tell him that I know that every generation likes to think about themselves in extremes—things are either better or worse than they’ve ever been—but it sure seems like we’re seeing extreme views right now.

“The liberal Republican and conservative Democrat have become extinct,” he confirmed. “Before, you wouldn’t necessarily dismiss what a Democrat said or what a Republican said by virtue of their partisan affiliation, because that wasn’t an automatic indication of what their beliefs were. That’s not the case anymore. And what we’re seeing is that when you have ideologically active partisans presented with conflicting evidence, they double down on their initial inclinations. The people with the most well-developed worldviews are the ones who are most resistant to accepting disconfirming evidence.”

We touch on the subject of trust, and Dickinson said that when we view our governing institutions as out of touch with our concerns, as a significant portion of the electorate does, “we increasingly are willing to discount what they tell us is the truth. And if you don’t trust the government, why should you trust the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health?” The populist movement that has aligned itself with Donald Trump on the right and with Bernie Sanders on the left has further exacerbated these inclinations, Dickinson said. “One of the hallmarks of populism is a distrust of elites, and that seems particularly pronounced in this election cycle. And science can be a part of that.”

***

I could have ended the story there, but that would have been depressing—plus I promised you a physicist, and I think you’ll be glad that I did.

Rich Wolfson is the Benjamin F. Wissler Professor of Physics, and he’s taught at Middlebury since 1976. Like any other Middlebury professor, his office bookshelves creak under the weight of their load, which, in his case, includes Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond and Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, along with the dozens of physics texts that have titles too long to include here.

Wolfson has authored a number of books himself, including Simply Einstein: Relativity Demystified and the texts Physics for Scientists and Engineers, Essential University Physics, and Energy, Environment, and Climate. The last book is about to reach its third edition, a milestone that Wolfson seems particularly proud of. Before achieving his PhD in physics, he earned a master’s degree in environmental studies and focused his thesis on environmental ethics.

He is active in outreach communications to what he calls “the non-science public,” something he has been doing for decades, “long enough that I have seen scientists move from looking down their nose at folks like me who reached out to lay people to recognizing that ‘hey, this might not be a bad idea.’”

Wolfson has taught courses on climate change since the 1990s and a specific course titled The Science of Climate Change since 2002. Designed for nonmajors, the class addresses the following questions: “Why do human activities affect climate? What future climatic changes can we expect? And what will be their impacts?”

He says that the course always fills—anywhere from 24 to 36 students. Half tend to be environmental studies majors, though not those already in the science track. The rest include religion majors, econ majors, history majors. (Similarly, Grasswick reports that her course on Science and Society draws not only philosophy majors and other humanities students, but also neuroscience majors and biochem majors. “I’ve had students tell me that it’s so great to also think about science in addition to practicing it.”)

On the day that I visited Wolfson in his sunny Bi Hall office, his Science of Climate Change students were taking an exam. Sporadically, they would filter into his office, seeking clarification on one question or another. Most queries were focused on one specific part of the exam, a classically Wolfsonian-inspired entreaty to analyze a climate system for a fictional planet named Zorq. For weeks they’d been studying Earth’s energy flows, Wolfson explained, and this particular task was a simpler subset of what they’d been studying.

As the top of the hour neared, students began to spill into the office, dropping off their exams. To each, Wolfson asked, “Did you get Zorq?” Responses ranged from the confidently affirmative to shakier “I think so?” As I prepared to leave, I thanked Wolfson for his time and added, “I hope they all get Zorq.”

“They won’t,” he replied. “But that’s not entirely the point, is it?”

I smiled, and thought about something Barbara Hofer had told me. Those first-year students who had failed to understand the meaning of scientific theory, who had wanted creationism to be taught alongside evolution to ensure a “balanced debate”? A longitudinal follow-up to that study showed who had changed their views and why. Those who had exhibited “scientific curiosity” by indicating they intended to take further courses in the sciences (whether they had actually done so or not) had changed the way they thought about the issue.

The revival of a 200-year-old speech competition gets prime-time trappings.

And it just might change the curriculum.

Sitting with my fellow judges in a packed Dana Auditorium, I feel like Simon Cowell in Middlebury’s version of America’s Got Talent. The College hasn’t fully gotten oratory just yet, but tonight’s Parker Merrill Speech Competition is a promising step.

Dana Yeaton, the event’s director and mastermind, bustles up and down the aisle, obsessing over the sound and quality of video. As the founder of Oratory Now, an effort to bring the art back to the College, this theatre professor has a lot riding on the event. It could be the start of something big—big as in, restoring rhetoric to its rightful place in the academy and giving renewed vigor to the perceived value of a liberal education.

Actually, I’m more token geezer than Simon Cowell. My fellow judges, both much younger, have serious oratorical chops. Dena Simmons ’05, a newly minted EdD working at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, has given two TEDx Talks as well as a TED Talk on Broadway. Cloe Shasha ’11 founded TEDxMiddlebury and now works as the content and program producer at TED itself. TED is the Big Top of oratory, the Woodstock and Bonnaroo of the spoken word. Simmons and Shasha’s generation truly recognizes the value of the art.

*

A word about oratory: It’s to speechmaking what writing is to typing. Oratory injects thought into speech. The original form of persuasion, it moves an audience, changing its mood, its mind, even its willingness to change the world.

Of course, there’s evil oratory as well as good, as every dictator will show you. Effective oratory disguises its tricks. Donald Trump’s rousing non sequiturs, delivered in 12-second comedic punch lines, instinctively imitate the ancient Greek period, a point or concept delivered in the length of a human breath. (The Greeks believed that the patterns of our brains follow the rhythmos, or symmetry, of our bodies.) His audiences love this brilliant attention-holding device. Modern sophisticates, who see only the buffoon, reveal a fundamental ignorance.

Our forebears knew otherwise. Applicants to Middlebury in the early 1800s used Latin oratory as a form of SAT; a student was considered worthy of entrance if he could recite long passages of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s unparalleled prosecution of the Roman rebel Catiline. Top graduates gave Latin orations at Commencement. But the art soon faded as the classics became increasingly unfashionable. By 1855, when pastor and Middlebury trustee Thomas A. Merrill added his name to the College’s Parker Speech Competition—thus inaugurating the Parker Merrill Prize—he made the affair sound like an exercise in deportment. The winner, he said, would demonstrate “the superior propriety and elegance of his manners.”

Harvard administered the coup de grâce to the dying art in 1876, when Francis James “Stubby” Child, Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, got himself awarded a chair in English literature. The first Boylston professorship had been filled by John Quincy Adams, who shared the rhetorical secrets of the ancients (and whose syllabus provided my own introduction to the art). Professor Child, on the other hand, disdained oratory, saying he “would much rather be teaching dancing.”

As Harvard went, so went Middlebury, to the point where spoken rhetoric—one of the original liberal arts—became at best an extracurricular activity. The Parker Merrill competition itself went moribund in 1965, staying silent until this spring, when Dana Yeaton and his cadre of Oratory Now peer tutors chose to revive it.

*

A wiry, successful playwright, Yeaton took his first step toward oratory five years ago with a first-year seminar titled Speechmaker’s Studio. The class borrowed a popular technique from the ancients by channeling great speakers through the ages, from Demosthenes and Lincoln through Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr.—with a dose of spoken-word poetry and TED Talks. In 2014, Speechmaker’s Studio became a J-term course and began to morph, Yeaton says, “from a class into something of a movement.” Students who complete a nine-hour training program can qualify as paid “oratory coaches,” while faculty can dial up a pair of Oratory Now tutors for any class or project. Organizations like TEDxMiddlebury, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee, and Midd Entrepreneurs collaborate regularly with Oratory Now; so does the Center for Careers and Internships. Oratory can now even fulfill the PE credit, with a single eight-hour course.

But Middlebury oratory isn’t all about physical drama. “I’ve seen coaches come out of a session absolutely giddy about the sudden improvement in someone’s delivery,” Yeaton says (rather giddily).

“But my greatest pleasure comes from the writing, when someone finally shrinks their argument to its essence. When at last they tailor their style to an actual audience. That’s when our forays into Aristotle and Cicero start to make sense.”

In other words, the thinking part, known as rhetoric. Harvard wasn’t the first institution to try and kill the art. The invaders of ancient Rome did a good job at it, along with a faction of early Christians—among them Saint Augustine, who renounced his profession as a rhetorician. Rhetoric managed to survive in desiccated form throughout the Middle Ages and finally underwent a vigorous revival during the Enlightenment. Rhetorical thinking permeates the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Every one of the Founding Fathers received a rhetorical education in some form. Thomas Jefferson absorbed John Locke, an Oxford lecturer in rhetoric whose modern theories of the state were deeply influenced by the art. James Madison studied at the feet of Princeton rhetoric professor (and Declaration signer) John Witherspoon.

The art rebounded yet again during the 1960s, when the literary critic Kenneth Burke published a brilliant set of books applying Freudian and Marxist theories to classical rhetoric. More recently, Middlebury’s own President Laurie Patton employed the metonymy—a trope first described by the ancient Sophists—in her published analysis of Indian mantras.

Meanwhile, the art never died among the land-grant universities, which remained relatively uninfluenced by the academic fashions emanating from Harvard. A student can major in rhetoric at UC-Berkeley, Iowa State, Indiana University, and dozens of other schools. Still, not a single Ivy League university or NESCAC school offers a formal major in the subject. Dana Yeaton’s ambition goes beyond reviving a contest, or helping students overcome their public speaking jitters; he’d like the liberal art of persuasion to be back at the center of a Middlebury education.

But tonight he has an event to run.

*

Of the original 24 contestants, only a half dozen have advanced to deliver short versions of their speeches to a panel of three faculty judges and a packed Abernethy Room audience. Tonight, the six finalists will give a six-minute speech; and then we, “the esteemed alumni judges,” will pick the winner.

First, the musical. Dana has earned himself the reputation of a campus impresario, directing blockbuster celebrations like the New England Review Out Loud performance, and he can’t resist doing a takeoff on Broadway’s Hamilton for this evening’s opener. Oratory Now students gamely rap Dana’s lyrics, bringing us up to speed on Parker Merrill history.

And then the speeches. Like a lot of you, I’ve suffered through many a presentation delivered by a student reading from a text at supersonic speed and sotto voce volume. Tonight, though, notes are forbidden; some of the contestants have clearly memorized their texts, while others daringly ad lib. All of them look nervous.

The talks themselves pay varying attention to the official theme, “True North: A Principle to Guide Us Through Troubled Times.” But the real topic of the evening, for most of the speakers, seems to cover the tribal tensions infesting elite campuses. August Hutchinson, a senior Feb, is the first contestant, and he offers great sound bites while describing his meeting with a group of anti-Semites. “When was the last time you were silenced into agreement?” he asks, somewhat rhetorically. He’s wearing a jacket and tie, and his parents sit in the audience. He gets big applause; but then they all do. Most of the audience consists of students, all of whom provide a healthy dose of support.

Next, Tabitha Mueller, a sophomore Feb, talks movingly about her father dying when she was a little girl. She livens her story with a fine comedic delivery and delivers a moral: “Listening to myself . . . isn’t selfish.”

Then up comes Briana Garrett, a first-year student, who seems much less rehearsed than the others. Offering a look of comic terror at the audience, she begins, “Guess it’s too late to leave now.” She stands shyly at the back of the stage and unnecessarily tells us, “I’m black. I’m female.” And yet she wins over the audience with a beautiful voice and perfectly timed dramatic pauses. She speaks of compassion as a kind of action—one that “could get my brother out of prison.” Leaving the stage in tears, she ends up winning the audience’s choice award.

The contrast is striking, especially when sophomore Peter Dykeman-Bermingham follows her. He begins with a physics joke and speaks confidently about emotions being “physical events, grounded in their tangibility.” (Extra points for him: The ancient Greeks believed the same thing, which is why “pathetic” and “pathology” have the same root.)

“My path through true north runs through the south,” says the next speaker, Dominick Tanoh, a slim African American sophomore from Chicago. By “south,” it turns out, he means “South Side,” a place that contrasts starkly with his experience growing up on the North Side, but where recently he began to uncover a deepening sense of faith.

Last up: Nia Robinson, another African American, who talks about discovering the Torah while visiting a Jewish temple. Her writing is beautiful, and she delivers it crisply, with authority. Her theme comes from Jewish scripture: We’re not obligated to complete the righteous work, but we must not stop doing it. “The work that saves the world,” she says, “is doing what we can.”

I whisper to fellow judge Dena Simmons, “We’ll all be working for her someday.” Simmons whispers back: “She’s a freshman.”

We judges get escorted to an empty room while students and faculty play PowerPoint Roulette, speaking to slides they’ve never seen before. We sit around a table wondering exactly how we’re supposed to pick a winner. I suggest we use Cicero’s five canons of oratory: Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery. We end up winnowing them down to three:

Delivery, or the way the speaker performed the words.

Invention, or the ideas behind the speech.

Arrangement, or the order and timing of the words.

Which help us only a little. The speakers were all so good, but so different. In the end, after much scoring and discussion, we decide on Nia Robinson, the last contestant. (For more on Robinson, see the spring 2016 cover story, “Let’s Talk About Race.”) Honestly, any one of the six could have won. All of them performed beautifully; none of them expressed a truly revolutionary thought. (But how many TED speakers do, really?) “I was hoping for a little more invention,” Dana Yeaton says to me later.

Which itself counts as a victory, I think. After all, when was the last time a Middlebury professor used the word “invention” to mean the thought behind a speech?

Clearly, Middlebury oratory is beginning to find its voice.

Jay Heinrichs ’77 is the author of Thank You for Arguing, published in seven languages and used in more than 3,000 college courses nationwide. He wrote “Felix Against the Barbarians” for the spring 2013 issue of the magazine.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/orational-thought/feed/3noThe revival of a 200-year-old speech competition gets prime-time trappings. And it just might change the curriculum. Middlebury MagazineThe revival of a 200-year-old speech competition gets prime-time trappings. And it just might change the curriculum. middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/orational-thought/The Secret to the Success of Seven Dayshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/Z7grcAAvq84/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/the-secret-to-the-success-of-seven-days/#commentsThu, 04 Aug 2016 12:39:23 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14676

How Paula Routly ’82 and her band of journalists have flourished in a field where so many others have floundered.

There’s a saying in the literary world: If you want your book to get a bad notice, have a friend review it. Under the guise of bending over backward to be fair, some spite and envy will leak in.

So I am here to say about my old friend Paula Routly ’82, the publisher, cofounder, and coeditor of the Burlington-based weekly newspaper Seven Days, the most vibrant and envied publication in New England journalism: She drives like a little old lady. She cannot keep a secret. She dislikes children, even those that belong to her friends. (When my two kids were very young, they placed a fake pint of spilled ice cream on her white futon sofa. To remark that she was not amused would be an understatement.) She has lost all but her most devoted friends—of which there are still many, I should add—because she is obsessed with her work and will cancel long-made social plans at the last instant to improve the first paragraph of a not-earthshattering news story that arrived a bit late. A former ballet dancer, she is a control freak with steely resolve. She can pinch a penny until it yodels.

About this mild roasting, what can I say? I’ve known Routly for years.We’re competitive. But I’m happy to have a chance to speak about her. She’s one of the least boring people I know, one who has no tolerance for small talk, and one who—now we’re truly entering the land of full disclosure—was the best “man,” 22 years ago, at my wedding. Routly’s story is a good one. In fact, it’s among the best and most optimistic stories that beleaguered American journalism currently has to tell.

It’s a story about how Routly and her friend Pamela Polston, who was once the lead singer in a well-regarded Burlington punk band called the Decentz, borrowed $68,000 in 1995 to start a scrappy little arts weekly. (Yes, Pamela is an old friend of mine, too.) These two had no business experience, and their timing could not have been worse: The Internet was about to start doing to print publications what strip-mining does to the tops of mountains. They were warned by the owners of a well-funded but hapless rival weekly (more about them later, but imagine them twisting the ends of their mustaches), “We are going to bury you.” This became a David versus Goliath story in Vermont media circles, and David buried Goliath. Over two decades Seven Days has morphed into a $5.7 million multimedia company. At a time when most of America’s alternative weekly newspapers are dead (the Boston Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Guardian) or a pale shadow of their former selves (the Village Voice, the Chicago Reader), Seven Days is fat as a tick with advertising, and fatter with news its readers actually use.

Seven Days is a free newspaper. Most weeks it is a ripe-to-bursting 112 pages or more, a number unheard of for most weeklies even during the holiday shopping season. Each issue is filled with news about everything from, say, the afterlife of Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and the plight of Syrian refugees in Rutland to rowdy new Burlington bands and the city’s even rowdier food scene. Seven Days takes an almost Talmudic interest in Vermont microbreweries, and copies of its annual sex and pot surveys—these are gritty, kinky, strange, and hilarious—are snapped up as soon as they hit the streets. Each week more than a dozen drivers deliver the paper to some 1,100 locations all over the state and across the lake in New York, two hours in each direction. The paper has grown from a handful of employees to more than 65. More than a few Middlebury graduates have cycled through Seven Days. Some are happily still there. These include Don Eggert ’98, the weekly’s creative director and associate publisher, who has worked there for 18 years. Nothing really seems to happen in Vermont unless Seven Days has covered it.

Don Eggert ’98, Creative Director and Associate Publisher

The journalism world is paying attention. In 2013 the industry magazine Editor & Publisher named Seven Days one of its “10 Newspapers That Do It Right.” It was the only weekly to make the list. The same year, writing for the Atlantic, James Fallows studied the paper’s attainments in a piece titled “Strange Tales from the North Country: A Profitable (Print) Newspaper.” Fallows and others are curious about many aspects of Seven Days’ success. How did it fight off the powerful Internet businesses (Yelp, Monster, Craigslist, Match.com, CareerBuilder, Cars.com, LivingSocial, Groupon) that have drained the plasma from most print publications? How did it steal so much authority from the Burlington Free Press, the city’s once-powerful daily, hiring away some of its best news reporters? How did it become so multitentacled and multiplatform?

To understand the reach of Seven Days, you have to look beyond its print product. It runs annual tech expos that are attended by thousands of people. It hosts singles events, restaurant weeks, and beloved first-time homebuyer tutorials. It publishes student, dining, and tourist guides. (The last, because of Vermont’s close relationship with Canada, is printed in French and English.) It operates a publication for kids and one about home design. It has two mobile apps, one that lets you read the entire paper on your phone, the other a business directory. It made a video game! It is so avid about keeping its many pages of employment advertising that every time a new ad comes in, the paper tweets it.

“Paula is one of the most forward-thinking publishers in America,” Mark Zusman tells me. He’s the editor and publisher of Willamette Week, a media company based in Portland, Oregon, and the former president of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia. He fondly recalls the time, a few years ago, when he and a few other weekly newspaper publishers were visiting Vermont. Routly had them to her house for a cocktail party, and Bernie Sanders, to their happy astonishment, dropped by for a meet-and-greet. “He sort of grumbled and grunted,” Zusman says, “and told us all what a bad job we were doing. Then he left.”

Zusman adds: “Paula’s newspaper is serious and speaks truth to power. She also knows her market, is frugal, and is interested in building community. In our industry, when we learn that she’s trying something, we pay attention. We’d be fools not to.”

*

“Do you remember your first semester at Middlebury?” Routly asks me. It’s a warm afternoon in late June and we’re sitting in Adirondack chairs in the backyard of her house in Burlington’s Old North End. The house’s exterior is modest, but in the rear it has a wraparound IMAX view of Lake Champlain. She bought it in 2009, in a rare splurge on something other than her newspaper. Routly is wiry—she’s a relentless swimmer and a StairMaster obsessive—with hazel eyes and dark brown hair that she piles into a wave above her forehead. In a sitcom, she’d be played by “Seinfeld”-era Julia Louis-Dreyfus. We’re talking about how Middlebury shocked the hell out of both of us when we arrived there, her in 1978 and me in 1984. We are bonding over social class. Neither of us was prepared for preppies and, in fact, barely knew then what a prep school was. How do all these people know each other already? Why do they have names like “Winky”?

“I remember thinking, How are they so relaxed and confident?” she tells me. “And they could be so nice. They’d take you home at Thanksgiving. You’d get off the highway and then drive for a long time until you’d start to think to yourself, Wait, we’re still driving. Then gates would open. It was like Downton Abbey.” She obsessed over status in part because, at Middlebury, she had so little money. Her parents gave her a strict allowance of $40 a month, not always enough to buy Tampax, much less burgers and beers downtown at the Alibi. She hated to so often be, to use her term, a mooch.

They say the best way for parents to teach children about money is not to have any. Routly’s parents were not poor, but they were meticulous and they were scrimpers. Her father, Paul Routly, was an astrophysicist with a PhD from Princeton. (He liked to tell the story of how he once almost ran over a distracted Albert Einstein.) Routly and her older sister, Pam, grew up largely in Princeton, where their father was the executive director of the American Astronomical Society. Later they moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he worked at the U.S. Naval Observatory. She remembers him as a frustrated and remote man (“he probably shouldn’t have had children”) who worked with enough geniuses to know he wasn’t one. His work ethic appealed to her, however. He cowrote a book called Galactic Astronomy, writing at night after coming home from work. “That image of him working over the dining room table late at night, being driven to do something beyond what he had to do, made an impression on me,” she says. He’d order a pizza at 1 a.m. and Routly would come down from bed and help him eat it.

During high school, Routly fell deeply into the ballet world, so much so that she barely got to know her classmates and did not go on dates. This was Soviet-style ballet, heavy on theory and so immersive that she left school every day at noon to attend practice. This felt like her new family, and she had talent. She was accepted to the New York City feeder school for the Joffrey Ballet but gradually realized she didn’t have what it took to go further. In distress she fled to a summer camp she knew about in the Adirondacks. There she gained 30 pounds, made a lot of friends, got her first period, became a camp counselor, and learned how to hug. “This was big,” she says. “We didn’t hug in my family.”

At Middlebury she graduated with a joint major that her father liked to jokingly refer to as “14th-century Italian cinema.” In reality, it was in Russian and Italian. She didn’t write any journalism at Middlebury, but she did take semesters off to do exotic things like walk the Pacific Crest Trail and bicycle in New Zealand. (She earned money for her adventures by waitressing at Mister Up’s.) Often there was a boy involved in these trips. She met her first husband, Theo Miller ’81, at the Italian table in the Château. They married in Vermont in 1983—at Cate Farm in Plainfeld, an organic operation run by Middlebury graduates—after he’d worked in the Peace Corps in Benin, West Africa. (When Paula visited him there, she got hepatitis. He left the corps early to escort her home.) Neither was ready for a commitment; the marriage lasted nine months.

Single and back in Vermont, Routly got a job at Burlington’s Flynn Theater, the city’s defining performing arts space, doing public relations and marketing. She felt like she was back in a world she loved and understood. She also began writing freelance dance reviews for the Vanguard Press, then a thriving alternative weekly in Burlington. She was soon offered a position at the daily Burlington Free Press, a Gannett newspaper, where she founded its standalone weekend arts section.

In 1988 she met the man who would become her second husband. Routly and Roger Clapp, a hunky fellow with an Abe Lincoln-like chinstrap beard, had a whirlwind romance. Early in their relationship, he was offered a job doing resettlement work in Uganda, and she decided to go with him. They impulsively married and jumped on a plane. They were in Uganda for two years. Paula taught English there and did some serious photography, but was eager to come home. The locals called her “Mrs. Roger,” and she felt she’d lost her identity. (The couple divorced in 2000. He wanted children; she did not.)

We are nearing the spot where I make a small but stylish cameo appearance in this story. While Routly was in Africa, the Vanguard Press closed and reopened as a more straitlaced newsweekly called Vermont Times. In 1990, I became its first arts editor. When Paula returned from Uganda, she began to write dance criticism for me. I remember her first piece, a review of Mark Morris’s company at the Flynn, because she called me afterward to complain about the dumb headline (“Happy Feet”) I’d put on it. She was right. Headline writing-wise, that was a low point. We finally met a few weeks later and instantly became friends. I helped her get hired as a staff writer at Vermont Times. When I moved with my fiancée (Cree LeFavour ’88) to New York City in 1993, Routly took my job as arts editor.

Vermont Times was never very successful. In 1994, in an attempt to save it, its publishers decided to turn it into two separate publications, one for arts and one for news. Routly brought in Polston, the former punk rocker and also the former arts editor of the Vanguard Press, and together they started an arts publication called Vox. It was more successful than its sister news spinoff, but not successful enough to save the company.

“We realized about three months in that the whole company was for sale,” Routly says. “The buyer was a publisher of penny savers in the Adirondacks. They had one editor overseeing eight newspapers. We could see the writing on the wall. We knew they would never keep Vox going as it was. They would gut it.”

Routly and Polston tried to purchase their baby outright, but the new owners asked for $100,000 and demanded an onerous noncompete clause. When Routly and Polston walked away from the talks and decided to start their own publication, one of the penny saver’s owners said to Routly, “We don’t know if your parents are paying for this, or if Pamela’s parents are, but we are going to bury you.”

Those words were all the motivation Routly and Polston needed. Three months later, on September 6, 1995, the first issue of Seven Days was on the streets of Burlington.

*

The bathroom at the Seven Days office is, strange to say, one of my favorite places in all of Vermont. Its walls are pink and covered top to bottom with kitschy religious and other memorabilia that staffers have dragged back from all over the planet. The place is a shrine, a truck stop instead of St. Peter’s, in REM terms. The last time I visited, there was also a roll of toilet paper with Donald Trump’s face on each square, along with sayings like, “We Shall Overcomb.”

The entirety of the sprawling Seven Days office, located not far from Burlington’s waterfront, is just as strange, warm and inviting. To enter it is to enter a combination record store, dorm room, bookshop, coffeehouse, and den. Posters and original art choke the walls. Dogs snooze under people’s desks. The director Cameron Crowe could set a sweet romantic drama here. (Two Seven Days reporters met their spouses through the paper’s personal ads.) There is a lactation lounge for new mothers. A wall along one long hallway, which a typical visitor would never see, is filled entirely with the dozens of awards the paper has won. These range from a prestigious Pushcart Prize, won in 1995 for Tom Paine’s short story “From Basra to Bethlehem,” through the paper’s seven general excellence awards from the Vermont Press Association over the years to Routly and Polston’s induction into the New England Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2015. There are so many of these awards that there is not space for them all. They overspill onto a table in a separate room, where they await TLC.

To walk though this office with Routly is to see her glow. She purposefully didn’t have children—“I could not have done this if I had had kids,” she says—but this is her family. Her employees tend to have similar feelings about her. Samantha Hunt, a University of Vermont graduate, was the paper’s first designer. She’s gone on to become an acclaimed fiction writer. Her first novel, The Seas, won a National Book Award for writers under 35. Hunt told me, “Paula is a thrilling storyteller, a loyal mama bear/cheerleader to many, a great journalist, and a great, great friend. We knew within moments of meeting we’d be lifelong colleagues and friends.”

The Vermont-based cartoonist Alison Bechdel, the author of the graphic memoir Fun Home and the now-defunct comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” which ran in Seven Days, told me: “It’s easy to see the tangible stuff, the way Seven Days is growing and financially successful at a time when newspapers everywhere are struggling. But the way Seven Days has created a Vermont community—that’s harder to see because the paper has become such a backdrop, such an integral part of life here. Paula is like Clark Kent—everyone knows she’s a successful, mild-mannered alternative weekly publisher. But I’m not sure everyone knows that she’s also a superhero.”

Andrea Suozzo ’09, Digital Content Editor

So how did Seven Days pull it off? How did it manage to create a thriving weekly newspaper at a time when publications all around it were crumbling? On some meta level, it’s a mystery—an only-in-Vermont anomaly. On another level, it’s no mystery at all. Routly’s frugality has played a big part. The paper has never been in debt, and it paid off its original investors—two were friends from Middlebury, Charlie and Mima Tipper, both ’81—within three years. Routly and Polston also had the good sense to give their publishing company a name (Da Capo Publishing) that was bigger and scarier than they are.

They made other canny moves. Early on, when Seven Days was known primarily as an arts paper, they hired the Falstaffian political columnist Peter Freyne, a barstool sage who was Vermont’s Mike Royko. This gave the political crowd in Montpelier a reason to pick up the paper. (Freyne died in 2009 after a battle with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Polston keeps some of his ashes in a box on the bookshelf behind her desk.) Seven Days has never run editorials. “At first Pamela and I were too busy to research and write them, and then we realized we also disagreed about some things,” Routly says. Even though the paper leans to the left politically and temperamentally, Routly thought, “Why give anyone a reason to write us off because they think we are predictable?”

The smartest thing Seven Days has done is to capitalize on the floundering fortunes of the Burlington Free Press. Seven Days has become a serious general interest news source, moving away from its alternative press roots. The paper has kept its classified ads strong because of its demographics. Businesses in Burlington want to reach Seven Days’ educated and interested readers.

It is attracting some of America’s best young journalists. One recent hire, straight from Columbia Journalism School, is Kymelya Sari. She is from Singapore and is likely Vermont’s first Muslim reporter. Among other things, she helps cover the state’s refugee community. She has written for the paper, among other topics, on what it is like to wear a hijab while reporting.

There have been some potholes in Routly’s path. In 2007, at the start of the recession, Craigslist appeared on the horizon. Here is Routly’s self-effacing description of how she responded: “I got a debilitating case of shingles and I thought it was over.” She was in a lot of pain—“I couldn’t leave the oatmeal bath for three months”—but the paper survived.

One work-related headache these days is her 14-year relationship with Tim Ashe, 39, a rising political star in Vermont. He’s 16 years younger than Routly, and the chair of Vermont’s senate finance committee. When he ran (and lost) for Burlington mayor in 2012, Routly’s news editors sometimes made her step out of meetings when coverage of him was discussed. Each time Ashe’s name appears in Seven Days, it is tagged with a disclaimer that reads, “Tim Ashe is the domestic partner of Seven Days publisher and coeditor Paula Routly.” Such are the problems of Vermont’s power couples.

One of the best things about Seven Days has always been its smart but unpretentious tone. When the paper issued its 20th-anniversary issue last year, it published a list called “Twenty Reasons We’re Still Here.” I like it, so I am going to print it here. (Note: “ISpys” are dating ads. Lola, Mistress Maeve, and Athena have been among the paper’s sex columnists. “Daysies” are the paper’s popular readers’ choice awards.)

Twenty Reasons We’re Still Here

Seven Days was “locavore” before there was a precious term for it.

It’s free—you can thank our advertisers for that.

In Vermont, our circulation drivers are more reliable than the Internet.

You can’t wrap presents, make mulch, or start a fire with Facebook.

ISpys. Maybe this week, right?

We actually live here.

You can’t do the Seven Days crossword online.

Unlike other local news outlets, we get to drop the F-bomb.
Fuck yeah.

We really, really try to eliminate typos.

Who else would you nervously ask about your penis size if not forLola, Mistress Maeve, and Athena?

It’s nice lookin’. Admit it—you even read the ads.

For Seven Days, serious word play is not an oxymoron.

Vermont is far more sophisticated than our rinky-dink populationwould suggest.

Two words: job ads.

The fearless Peter Freyne launched our news section.

You need something to read in the bathroom.

How else would you know what to do this weekend?

We bust our asses—no squat machine required.

It’s not all work: Think Mardi Gras, Art Hop, and Big Lebowski.

YOU. Thanks for picking up the paper, buying ads, sending letters,pet photos, suggesting stories, voting for the Daysies and giving us somuch to write about over the years.

The next afternoon, we’re again sitting out behind Routly’s house, talking. The view is astonishing, but she can’t totally give in to it. Her mind is where it always is, back in the Seven Days office. Pretty soon she’ll drive back there, like a little old lady, think about canceling some dinner plans, and put out another terrific issue.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/the-secret-to-the-success-of-seven-days/feed/4noHow Paula Routly ’82 and her band of journalists have flourished in a field where so many others have floundered. Middlebury MagazineHow Paula Routly ’82 and her band of journalists have flourished in a field where so many others have floundered. middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/the-secret-to-the-success-of-seven-days/Pursuits: The Newbornhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/Ct4pI9v6q_E/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/pursuits-the-newborn/#commentsThu, 04 Aug 2016 12:39:00 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14683

Kate Brutlag Follette ’04

For an astrophysicist who hunts for planets in other solar systems, there’s nothing more exciting than discovering one being born.

It turns out that witnessing the birth of a planet—something that has never been done before—doesn’t deliver a cinematic moment of astrophysicists huddled in an observatory and erupting in excitement at their discovery.

It unfolds more like this: one month after defending her dissertation and just before she began a postdoctoral position at Stanford, Kate Brutlag Follette ’04 decamped for the southern Atacama Desert of Chile, and the Las Campanas Observatory’s Magellan Clay telescope—a 6.5 meter-diameter mounted telescope on the summit of Cerro Manqui. Because of their size (anywhere from two to eight times the size of telescopes launched in space), ground-based telescopes can resolve images unseen by smaller scopes and also collect up to 64 times as much light, a key capability when one is attempting to image the faintest of objects—like an exoplanet, a planet in another solar system.

Telescopes like Magellan are at the heart of a new technique in astronomy called “direct imaging,” in which astronomers are able to directly image exoplanets. Until recently, discoveries of exoplanets were all indirect observations—that is, inferences were made by observing the stars that these planets orbit. During the past few decades, nearly 3,000 exoplanets have been discovered, with more than two-thirds of those being detected by the Kepler space telescope. But for all of those Kepler discoveries, the planets in question have not actually been seen; they’ve been inferred by observing the shadow that they cast on the star in the system. Direct imaging is unique in that it is the only method by which an exoplanet is actually seen. Only a handful of exoplanets have been directly imaged, the first occurring during the past decade.

Follette was drawn to the doctoral program at the University of Arizona because of its access to some of the largest telescopes in the world (including Magellan); subsequently, her participation on planet-imager survey teams positioned a young grad student as a pioneer in a field that could forever alter our understanding of space.

Which takes us back to Chile. In the fall of 2014, Follette had returned for “one more observing run” while she still had access to Arizona’s telescopes. “But here’s the thing,” she says. “You rarely know whether you’ve seen anything new when you’re at the telescope. It’s not until later when you do a detailed analysis of the data that you know whether you have an interesting result.” So Follette was at Stanford in the early months of 2015 when her data revealed something never before imaged directly—an exoplanet in the process of formation.

“You have a moment of exhilaration when you think you see something interesting in your data,” she says, “but there are lots of tests to go through to be sure.” And every test confirmed her discovery. “But we didn’t think anyone would believe us until we imaged it again to prove it was still there,” she says, “and the season for observing it was already past, so we’d have had to wait at least a year.” So Follette was resigned to sit on her discovery—until she learned that another astrophysicist had also found the planet, albeit through an indirect method. “People have fairly well-founded skepticism about inferences from certain indirect detection methods—it’s probably a planet, but it could be something else,” says Follette. But in this case she had also seen the planet—literally. So the two coauthored a paper for Nature, in which they announced the birth of LkCa 15 b.

“I had spent my entire graduate career taking high-resolution images of protoplanetary transition disks, making a case that they could only be caused by planets in the process of forming,” she says. But Follette and others believed it would take the next generation of telescopes to image a planet while it was actively forming.

Until one day, she saw just that.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/pursuits-the-newborn/feed/1noFor an astrophysicist who hunts for planets in other solar systems, there's nothing more exciting than discovering one being born.Middlebury MagazineFor an astrophysicist who hunts for planets in other solar systems, there's nothing more exciting than discovering one being born.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/pursuits-the-newborn/Road Taken: Déjà Vuhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/XMKD2RsZZT8/
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The graffiti on the wall down the block from my student apartment in Paris was profane, referencing oil. I walked past it at least once a day in the winter and spring of 1991 on my way to class at Reid Hall, the building shared by Middlebury’s School Abroad with a cluster of other American colleges. Often, I walked by twice, once to class and again in the evening on the way to the home of the family I was renting from; they lived in another apartment a few blocks away from mine.

It wasn’t the only reminder that the Gulf War was unpopular in that corner of France. Dinners with the family—included in my rent and at least as educational as my semester of classes—featured regular conversations about current events.

All this returned with the clarity of a formative moment after the November 13 terrorist attacks on Paris. I work in a newsroom, so I spent the evening reading about those harrowing events unfolding across the Atlantic. The next morning, I woke after a lengthy dream, in which I was walking home from work through the darkened Paris streets. I stopped at a small restaurant, nothing fancy, and felt I was known there, a regular. It was my first dream of Paris, and my first in French, in years.

I don’t want to name the Parisian family I lived with, but other students of the era who rented from them will no doubt know who I’m talking about. The father was a school principal and an ardent Socialist, and the mother, his younger second wife, was Syrian. She had a young son, maybe eight or nine years old, whom she’d brought with her when she left Syria.

They were wonderful people, and I did indeed learn as much from them as from my classes. After spending my first five days in Paris with no one but the family, speaking nothing but French, I showed up at Reid Hall for the first day of class, and the first word I heard was a slack “Hey,” one of several cultural divides that proved hard to navigate that semester.

Most Thursday nights were couscous nights at the family’s apartment, and I remember them still as some of the best meals of my life. Often visitors—usually from another part of the Arab world or North Africa—would come by, bearing Tunisian pastries or dates stuffed with a mix of cheese and honey.

Conversation turned to the Gulf War. As the lone American at the table, I was often called on to explain the ways of my government. I wasn’t a supporter of the war, but I wasn’t prepared to offer a heartfelt denunciation either. Diffidence was my shield against my fellow diners’ questions. At one point, we decided that we’d consider me a Swede, officially neutral.

The question, or entreaty, that stayed with me from those conversations, because it is so resistant to solutions, was Pourquoi est-ce que les Etats-Unis peut pas fouter la paix au Moyen Orient?

Why can’t the United States leave the Middle East the fuck alone? Our economy’s thirst for oil is such that this question struck me, even then, as rhetorical or unanswerable.

Perhaps that was a failure on my part. Would another student in my seat at the dinner table have decided to seek an answer, or at least to reassure a Syrian woman resettled in Paris that her question was worth answering, even haltingly and incompletely?

To recall that question again, posed by a Syrian, reminds me that the conflict now manifesting itself in terrorist attacks and waves of refugees was already under way, visible and audible and angry, 25 years ago.

Alex Hanson ’92 is the features editor at Valley News, a daily paper in Lebanon, New Hampshire.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/road-taken-deja-vu/feed/0noA bombing in Paris jolts painful memories for a writer.Middlebury MagazineA bombing in Paris jolts painful memories for a writer.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/road-taken-deja-vu/Old Chapel: The Big Askhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/ljKTRt3-Sxw/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/08/04/old-chapel-the-big-ask/#commentsThu, 04 Aug 2016 12:38:17 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14689It was a beautiful May day, a few weeks before Commencement, and some students and I were sitting outside, enjoying the warm afternoon and the deepening greens of the mountains around us. We were talking about the end of the academic year, their approaching graduations, and their hopes and fears. Like most college seniors at the finish of their undergraduate careers, they expressed a healthy mix of anticipation, preparedness, eagerness, and nostalgia as they talked about the prospect of the future.

Some of these students also discussed how difficult it had been for them to discover their own voices and learn how to express them, especially when anything they said could be reposted online, and mocked or critiqued. In our conversation, we talked about how many faculty members, myself included, had experienced such unwanted cyber-exposure and survived, and went on to write more, and they all could too.

Then a student said something to me that I’ve been thinking about ever since: “Yes, but when we are still finding our voices, when we still don’t know who we are and need to experiment with those voices, that’s a big ask.”

It is a big ask. In a sea of constant digital connectivity, in an online world where anonymity is both a bane and a blessing, and where anything you post or publish can be met, almost immediately, with a scathing response (sometimes anonymous, sometimes not), it’s a big ask.

But, I propose that it’s a necessary ask, and one of our primary obligations as educators is to help students find ways to discover their voices, and to provide opportunities for them to express those voices without fear. The moment someone finds his or her voice, and then has ways to express that voice, is the moment of personal transformation in education.

I believe this challenge is all the more acute today because we live in an era where public approbation and disapprobation comes fast and furious, and is happening on a much larger scale than ever before.

But such challenges are also a part of history. I grew up in Danvers, Massachusetts, formerly known as Salem Village. While today Danvers is a thriving Massachusetts town, many of its citizens are still aware of the historical legacy of the Salem witch trials 300 years ago and what happens when a community does not allow for free, curious exploration without judgment. One of the little-known healers of the Salem Village community in the period right after the trials was Reverend Joseph Green. He helped citizens rebuild their town by allowing just that—for both accusers and accused to speak. In my view, he was an educator par excellence.

My academic work in India is also focused on helping people come to voice, and be committed to their own forms of creative expression. One project I am working on is a study of women learning and teaching Sanskrit, a language that they’ve been barred from mastering for over 3,000 years. It is fascinating to witness how these newly empowered teachers of a sacred language share that power with others in their classrooms.

Another project is focused on ancient forms of dialogue in India. Storytelling often takes the form of dialogue between two or more characters and shows how they grapple with a particular dilemma or challenge. In fact, reading the dialogues of ancient India can be much like reading the exchanges on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn today.

Many of these ancient conversations are between teachers and students and take place within intentional communities in forests and in mountains. When I read them now, they remind me of Middlebury and how powerful the bonds of teacher, student, and community can be in helping young people find their voices.

So for deep, long-term reasons located in the past, as well as the more immediate reason of creating a vibrant exchange in the present, I believe Middlebury has a responsibility to make that “big ask.” We need to create more environments to encourage students—literally to give them courage—to claim their voices in the public sphere.

What does summer sound like to you? In Middlebury, the soundscape is as distinct as the season itself; it’s as if the entire ecosystem has awoken from its long winter’s nap.

The day’s symphony begins as the sun rises, with open windows serving as speakers for the awakening world. I hear the songbirds long before I open my eyes; their melodies become as much a part of dawn’s auditory background as a beeping delivery truck is in a Brooklyn alleyway.

I don’t know much about birds. I can admire the martial bearing and precision of a hawk—
nature’s predator drone—conducting surveillance, and I delight at the sight of an oriole or a cardinal or any other brightly colored feathered creature. And sure, I know a jay or a bobwhite when I hear one; but for years I had no idea what was singing to me each summer morning. “Robins. Warblers. Hermit thrush,” a friend told me. I turned to Google and quickly identified the hermit thrush as one of my frequent serenaders. The state bird of Vermont, the hermit thrush has been called the “Mozart of the bird world.” Refined taste I have in birdsong.

The notes of the hermit thrush give way to the peals emanating from Mead Chapel’s bell tower each Friday afternoon. This summer marks the 31st season of the College’s annual carillon series, an event that brings musicians from around the world to perform on Middlebury’s carillon—one of only two in Vermont. George Matthew Jr., the College’s carillonneur for the past 30-plus years, has the August schedule to himself, and his performances are not to be missed.

Of course, if I’m honest, the sounds of summer are not always kind to the ear. As I write next to an open window on a pleasant June afternoon, a jackhammer does battle with some concrete down the street. And soon, the mowers will arrive for their weekly incursion, the growl of their engines linking up with the dat-dat-dat-dat of the jackhammer to form a particularly noxious duet. But no matter, evening will quiet things down, and then the hermit thrush will return to start the day anew.

We live in the golden age of the movie trailer, where every tiny revelation of a would-be blockbuster has the potential to go viral. That first teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens? Forty million views in just three days. And when the trailer for Deadpool debuted on Conan, Ryan Reynolds’ potty-mouthed mercenary character rode the ensuing buzz to a $132-million opening in February, a record for an R-rated film.

Last winter, another movie about a uniformed marksman—American Sniper, starring Bradley Cooper as real-life Navy SEAL Chris Kyle—became every studio executive’s dream: a “four-quadrant film” that connects with men, women, and the over- and under-25 audience, boosted by an edge-of-your-seat trailer. “They didn’t sell it as a war movie,” says Nick Temple ’99. “They sold it as a story about a man in an incredibly difficult situation.”

Temple’s advertising agency, Wild Card, worked on the campaigns for both American Sniper and Deadpool—as well as The Martian, Jurassic World, Black Mass, and a host of forthcoming releases that barely fits on a single whiteboard in his Culver City, California, office. By his measure, there are as many as 70 trailer shops in the business, but maybe seven “wind up doing the lion’s share of the big movies”—Wild Card among them.

Growing up in Chatham, New Jersey, the U.K.-born Temple majored in German with a minor in film studies at Middlebury. He got his first exposure to feature filmmaking through an internship on the Rutland set of Icebreaker (basically Die Hard at a ski lodge). Temple shot some short films on video for his classes, a process he found enjoyable, “but ultimately what I loved was the editing and assembly of it.”

After college, Temple drove across the country with a friend, picked up some odd jobs with film crews around Los Angeles, and finally scored steady work at a postproduction house in Burbank. “I took a job running tapes around town—you get the lay of the land that way,” he recalls. “And at night I was bothering people in their edit bays.”

In short order, Temple went from runner to managing runners to assistant editor to junior editor. He jumped over to Trailer Park, the world’s largest entertainment marketing agency, as an editor in 2003, and there his career took flight. Temple cut a Super Bowl commercial for Steven Spielberg’s 2005 War of the Worlds starring Tom Cruise, which spawned ongoing relationships with both Spielberg (he’s worked on all of his films ever since) and Cruise (most notably the Mission: Impossible franchise). And the connections “tree-branched out from there,” says Temple, who got the entrepreneurial bug in 2007.

Wild Card was founded as an LLC with two partners, a couple of edit bays, and 1,400 square feet of office space in Burbank. (Temple later bought out his partners and is now the company’s sole owner.) Since moving to a 7,500-square-foot office in Culver City in 2010, Wild Card has nearly tripled its space and quintupled its staff. “There’s a threshold:how do you sustain a creative culture without compromising your work?” says Temple, who still cuts anywhere from five to eight trailers a year himself.

Just a few short years ago, a brilliant marketing campaign would guarantee a solid opening weekend for even a stinker but now, with social media, if a movie is bad, the word gets out after Friday’s matinees. Conversely, positive word of mouth can propel a hit like The Martian to a final gross of $228 million domestically—four times its opening weekend numbers.

But it all starts with that first impression of the trailer. Temple still likes to get out to the multiplex with his wife, Alison. “When we used to go to the movies I’d want to watch all the trailers and gauge people’s reactions,” Temple says. “Now with two girls, ages three and five, we’re lucky if we get to the theater on time. And more often than not, it’s Alvin and the Chipmunks.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/06/03/pursuits-first-impressions/feed/0noThat movie trailer you just watched? It was probably the handiwork of Nick Temple '99.Middlebury MagazineThat movie trailer you just watched? It was probably the handiwork of Nick Temple '99.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/06/03/pursuits-first-impressions/Road Taken: Food Mattershttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/m7N6Tg6TZB0/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/19/road-taken-food-matters/#respondThu, 19 May 2016 20:02:06 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14648

It’s not hard to imagine, I’m sure: Middlebury College in the late 1970s, back-to-the-land students in a back-to-the-land state at an institution that hadn’t quite gotten the memo on what we were
interested in and why. For instance, unlike today, when sustainability is not just an ethic to study but also one to live by, our dining halls had not yet discovered whole grains or local produce. So a bunch of us did what free-living students do—we abandoned the meal plan and decided to feed ourselves.

We set up shop at Weybridge House, where many of us lived, laying claim to the kitchen. The Middlebury Co-op—at the time entirely based on pre-orders and bulk-food purchasing—became our primary food source. Each month we sat around the big, round dining room table to determine our needs for the next four weeks.

The Co-op was situated in the old railroad station on the northern edge of town, lending an impression that our food had just been unloaded directly from freight cars. Every 30 days we dragged home sacks of grains and beans, nuts and dried fruits; we procured monster blocks of Vermont cheddar and a most memorable 40-pound bucket of peanut butter with oil swirling on the top. For vegetables, we went to local “pick-your-own” farms, and stored root crops in the Weybridge basement alongside our home-brewed beer. (The beer was legal by state and College law at the time, or at least we convinced ourselves that this was true.) We baked our own bread, made yogurt by the gallon, sprouted everything possible, and, even once, attempted to make tofu.

We got by on $10 a week, per person, not including ice cream and the whole pig we once roasted in the forest by Bread Loaf. Each member contributed to the account and was assigned a night to cook. We had a daily lineup of dinner guests, mostly fellow students seeking momentary refuge from food on the hill. (I think they also enjoyed the candles, wooden bowls, chopsticks, beards, and long hair.) Sundays, however, were reserved for honored guests. Parents came, as did professors and College administrators. Dean Erica Wonnacott—with whom one of us was too often in some kind of negotiation—was a frequent guest; even President Olin Robison paid us a visit.

The College dining policy was to reimburse off-meal-plan students at 50 percent of their cost, which was $12.50 a week. However, with a doctor’s excuse, one could receive the full $25.00. Some of our pediatricians from home were willing to affirm our newfound dietary restrictions; others were not. I vividly remember the satisfaction of sharing my signed excuse letter at the dinner table. To this day, I imagine ours was the only U.S. bank account to have had the registered name “The Doctor’s Excuse”; I believe I still have a canceled check squirreled away somewhere in my attic.

A not-insignificant legacy of our group is that one of us, Richard “Wiz” Wiswall ’79, became an organic vegetable farmer; to this day, he owns and sinks his hands into the rich soils of Cate Farm in Plainfield, Vermont. Another legacy—I’d like to think, anyway—is that today’s Middlebury student is supported by a far better health-aligned dining service. No doctor’s excuse required.

Larry Childs ’81 is a senior trainer and consultant with Project Adventure, an international nonprofit organization that focuses on experiential education.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/19/road-taken-food-matters/feed/0noRecalling the dawn of a food movement at Middlebury.Middlebury MagazineRecalling the dawn of a food movement at Middlebury.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/19/road-taken-food-matters/Editor’s Note: The Conversationhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/mZ4SZJl4cnU/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/editors-note-the-conversation/#commentsMon, 16 May 2016 20:38:28 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14640It was nearly a year ago when I reached out to Dena Simmons ’05—a beautiful writer and fiercely intelligent young woman who works at the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale—to see if she would be interested in writing a feature essay on what it means to confront racism in America today.

For our fall 2015 issue, I wanted Dena to draw on both her own life experiences and those experiences lived by the students, teachers, and activists she’s encountered in her career. “I want this essay to speak to every reader,” I said, “and to be clear that this is an issue that involves all of us.”

The resulting work was her brilliant “We Cannot Afford to Walk Away,” whose title is drawn from this passage in the essay: We cannot afford to walk away, to turn off our screens, and to carry on with our comfortable lives. None of us, especially those in power, have the right to be comfortable. It’s through discomfort we learn and transform most. Questioning, challenging, and curbing racial injustices is everyone’s job.

A few weeks after we published Dena’s essay, Middlebury held the first of three campus gatherings in which issues of race, inclusivity, institutional history, free speech, and cultural appropriation were talked about, wrestled with, and argued over; tears of anguish and tears of frustration were shed. And while the catalyst for the meetings was one incident, it became clear to all that we were talking about more than an isolated occurrence. Questioning, challenging, and curbing racial injustices is everyone’s job.

For this issue’s cover story, we hired a dear friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer John H. White, to help us continue the conversation that began with Dena’s essay. While on campus he spoke to a crowded Wilson Hall, and among his inspirational words of wisdom was the affirmation that we all strive to “recognize the somebody-ness of everybody.” It is what we must do if we are to learn and transform and become a community where, as Laurie Patton has so eloquently stated, inclusivity is not a problem to solve but an everyday ethic.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/editors-note-the-conversation/feed/1noThis can't wait—there's something we need to talk about.Middlebury MagazineThis can't wait—there's something we need to talk about.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/editors-note-the-conversation/Old Chapel: The Next Level of Discussionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/AMQOyjtn4EQ/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/old-chapel-the-next-level-of-discussion/#commentsMon, 16 May 2016 20:33:38 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14638This has been a year of uncomfortable conversations on campus. And that makes me comfortable.

This year, the administration, the student body, and campus as a whole had some difficult conversations with each other. We talked, sometimes calmly, sometimes heatedly, sometimes quietly, and sometimes loudly, about diversity and inclusivity, and what that means and should mean at Middlebury in 2016.

These conversations at times have been painful for those in the center of them, and for those who were closer to the edges, listening in. We heard truths, and sorrow, and impatience. We heard hopes, and fears, and dreams, and frustrations. And we heard moments of real engagement and possibility.

Why does this make me comfortable? Because these are important conversations, and our ability to have them reveals our strength as a community. We all, from time to time, must speak uncomfortable truths to one another. That is what it means to have “arguments for the sake of heaven,” as I mentioned in my inaugural address. These are discussions worth having. Part of the nature of a college campus, and certainly a campus such as Middlebury, is that a free exchange of ideas is not only expected but encouraged. Uncomfortable truths are a matter of course. Professors present ideas to their students that make them uncomfortable. Students in turn can present ideas to professors that make them uncomfortable. Students can also wrestle withcourse material, or class discussions, or campus events, or with each other. Staff have also played critical roles in these tough conversations.

Butdiscomfort is not a reason to avoid free expression, even when it comes to expressing thoughts and ideas and beliefs aboutinclusivity. Supporting free speech and supporting inclusivity in our language, our conversations, and our actions are not goals that are at odds with each other. In fact, they are helpful complements to each other. Supporting both allows us to take our discussions to the next level, where we can make mistakes without fear because we want to become more aware than we are today. We want to be stronger. We want to do better.

Diversity and inclusivity are not “problems” that we’re going to “solve.” They are part of an ethos that we need to hold up every day, even if we might fail to fulfill that ethos on a regular basis. They’re values that we live by. They are values for us to talk about, and consider, and embrace, as we grow in our understanding of what they mean today—at Middlebury and in the wider world.

There are many ways to have these conversations. We talk in person, one on one, in groups, in meetings, in symposium. We talk on the phone, through text and email. We put our names, our voices, our faces to our words. We humanize them. We own them.

But we must be more mindful, I believe, about our conversations when we talk through social media, which has an ever-increasing multitude of channels for us to communicate though. There are so many ways to speak one’s opinions. But there are also so many ways to be silenced. Tap a few keys and you can shut down a conversation you disagree with, or mute a voice you don’t like, or send a message of shame without ever having to own your words. The worst conversation is the conversation that isn’t allowed to be. My rule for us is: Face-to-face conversation first. Social media second.

We have had uncomfortable conversations, and we will keep on having them. And we’re bringing our conversations to the next level: The Alliance for an Inclusive Middlebury is planning a spring conference titled “Activists, Allies, and Accomplices: Responses to Racism Today.” The conference will consider contemporary responses to racism and examine historical precedents. Middlebury students will discuss white ally-ship and student activists from other colleges will discuss their experiences this last year and the issues they faced. Rinku Sen, the editor of Colorlines, will be the keynote speaker and Rashawn Ray, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, will discuss racial uplift through activism and social policy. JusTalks will be working with every incoming student next year in workshops helping them live in community while developing the crucial skills of engaging with real differences.

Yes, some of our conversations have madeus uncomfortable this year, but I’m comfortable that we’re having them. I’m comfortable knowing that we are learning from our mistakes, and we’re holding each other accountable—to own our words, to push us to the next level of inclusive excellence. We have so much we can learn from each other—as long as we keep talking, and keep listening.

Patton can be reached at president@middlebury.edu.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/old-chapel-the-next-level-of-discussion/feed/2noThis has been a year of uncomfortable conversations on campus. And that makes me comfortable. Middlebury MagazineThis has been a year of uncomfortable conversations on campus. And that makes me comfortable. middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/old-chapel-the-next-level-of-discussion/Let’s Talk About Racehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/z2KSXcbo_W0/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/lets-talk-about-race/#commentsMon, 16 May 2016 16:32:59 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14610

As racial conflict unfolds on college campuses across the country, Middlebury wrestles with tensions of its own.

Last fall, the Black Student Union at Middlebury organized a solidarity blackout in support of Black students at Middlebury and on other campuses around the United States. A photograph taken in front of Carr Hall shows hundreds of Middlebury students gathered on an unseasonably warm November evening. By designed necessity (“It is essential we center Black bodies and experiences in this movement,” the BSU wrote on its Facebook page), persons identifying as Black stood in the front; behind them stood white students, faculty, staff.

Two weeks later, the Middlebury community would be looking inward after an incident in a College dining hall. A white first-year student had worn a sombrero to dinner and when asked by a fellow student, a Latino senior, why she had chosen to wear it, her frivolous answer was too difficult for him to ignore. His attempt to explain how her actions were hurtful to him—that within the current context she was appropriating a culture, his culture—were met, those present say, with indifference. The resulting argument spilled over and ignited on social media, particularly the anonymous forum Yik Yak, and though students were leaving the following week for Thanksgiving break, the College administration arranged a pair of town hall-style forums—immediately before and immediately after the break—to discuss the issues of cultural appropriation, community standards, freedom of expression, and what it means to be an inclusive community. By the second forum—a capacity event in Dana

Auditorium, with scores of people turned away—it was clear that while the dining hall incident may have been the spark that ignited the discussions, there were broader, deeper, and far more entrenched issues to deal with. On December 11, a third forum was held in Mead Chapel. And while the gathering opened with a tearful apology from the first-year student who had worn the sombrero, the rest of the 90-minute conversation moved beyond any one incident and spoke to those broader, deeper, and more entrenched issues, feelings, and states of mind and being.

For some people in attendance at any of the events, hearing about racial (and sexist, homophobic, and ethnic) offenses, both explicit and implicit, on the campus was a revelation, as was the pain, frustration, and anger expressed by students of color. No less palpable were the exhausted, at times defiant, statements from students of color that it should not be their sole responsibility to educate their classmates (or professors) on why they were hurt, why they were angry, why they were aggrieved.

Claudia Huerta ’18

Claudia Huerta, a sophomore from Manhattan, says that the town hall gatherings frightened her. “They opened my eyes to the realization that a lot of people on this campus had not been having these conversations. And it scares me because I think I took it for granted that people were talking about these things.”

An academic year that began with Middlebury’s new president expressing the fervent desire that the community consider diversity and inclusivity not as problems to be solved but as an everyday ethic, a way of living our lives, had found the College entering 2016 with a renewed focus on what it would take to turn that aspiration into reality.

***

The racial tensions that exist at Middlebury are not occurring in a vacuum. Across the country, college and university campuses are home to protests, sit-ins, and demands for change led by students of color. For every situation that has captured the nation’s attention—Missouri, Yale, Princeton—many more unfold weekly.

To better understand what is happening at Middlebury, I spoke to dozens of people—students, faculty, administrators, staff. The students of color I interviewed expressed varying degrees of satisfaction with the College, but to a person they spoke to the difficulties, the challenges of being a minority in a very white state and at a largely homogenous institution. (While the percentage of American students of color at Middlebury has steadily increased over the years to 24 percent of the student body, that still means that for these students more than three-quarters of their peers—and a far greater percentage of the faculty—don’t look like them, haven’t experienced life as they have, and often are unaware of what this can mean.)

Shuba Maniram ’17

Shuba Maniram, a junior at Middlebury, grew up in the South Bronx, the child of immigrants from Trinidad. Neither of her parents went to college, so the idea of going away to school wasn’t on her radar growing up, but when she was in sixth grade her teacher outfitted the entire class with T-shirts that read “College Student” on the front and “Class of 2017” on the back.

This teacher was Dena Simmons ’05, and the following year, Simmons brought Maniram and the rest of the class to visit Middlebury. (“Without Dena I wouldn’t be here,” Maniram says. “And by here I mean college as much as I mean Middlebury.”) Simmons continued to mentor Maniram throughout high school. They shared similar upbringings, and Simmons constantly challenged Maniram to push herself, to imagine a place beyond what was comfortable. When she was accepted to Middlebury, Maniram says the demographics of Vermont and Middlebury worried her, but she idolized Simmons and felt that she had her example to live up to.

But she wasn’t prepared for what awaited her. It wasn’t just the terminology and mechanics of higher education that baffled her; she couldn’t relate to many of her new classmates, nor they to her.

“I vividly remember a moment early in my freshman year when a couple of white girls came up to me and another student of color in the dorms and asked us to show them how to twerk. We said no, so they proceeded to twerk and laugh in front of us. And that was my introduction to what I would come to face at Middlebury.

“And I feel like that moment is symbolic. I didn’t know what microaggressions were—I had never heard the term and wouldn’t have understood the concept then—but that was the first of many times when people made assumptions about me because of what I looked like.”

Maniram and all of the students of color I spoke to say that these assumptions are insulting and invalidating and have not been limited to the dorms, dining halls, or social spaces; for many, the worst microaggressions come in the classroom, when peers or faculty have turned to the one Black person in the room when topics such as slavery, poverty, or urban blight are being discussed. Sometimes the person is explicitly asked to explain a culture; often it’s just a look, a sideways glance that is subtle but no less implicit.

“Differences in race and class can reinforce alienation, not just here, but anywhere,” says Roberto Lint Sagarena, an associate professor of American studies and director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. “But race can compound this feeling, because often it’s a visual difference; it almost becomes exponential in terms of feelings of alienation. And this sets a tone so that students are sensitized to microaggressions. You’re already feeling out of place, like you might not belong, so these slights become magnified. And that increases that sense of pain. A look that might or might not have been something racist or problematic can be interpreted that way.”

Nia Robinson ’19

First-year student Nia Robinson came to Middlebury because she wanted to be around students who had experienced life differently than she had. A Posse scholar from Chicago, Robinson attended a high school with twice as many students as Middlebury. She has two younger half-siblings, and she says that when she would go places with them in Chicago, she’d often be mistaken for a nanny; her stepfather is white. So, she says, she was under no illusions that going to a school in rural Vermont wouldn’t be a challenge; yet she says now she can’t think of a day when she hasn’t questioned why she’s here. “I’m having such a disconnect because I feel like people aren’t willing to work to understand other people. There are a lot of people here who don’t understand me, and it’s not because I’m a complicated person,” she says. “It’s because we don’t have those conversations. I care a lot about Middlebury, and some days it feels like most people don’t care enough to at least try and understand why a segment of this student body is unhappy.

“But at the same time, I understand that not everyone is having my experience, and for some people, Middlebury is perfect. They think, ‘We don’t have to make it better. It’s great.’”

***

At the conclusion of the third town hall meeting in December, President Laurie Patton stood at the front of Mead Chapel and addressed the community. “I have seen remarkable intentionality and thoughtfulness in this conversation—and I have also seen ways in which we could improve both in our mindfulness of each other, as well as our hopes for the future.”

She then stated five guiding principles that she hoped would help the community to move forward. “We must make sure that no single group bears the burden of difference, but that we all aspire to inclusivity—those of us who are not part of historically underrepresented groups need to stand in alliance with those who are; we need to not be afraid to make mistakes and engage with others; I want us to have an open and complex understanding of free speech—free speech is not the opposite of inclusivity; the very way we create a more inclusive community is by exercising free speech and continuing to create understanding even in the midst of tension-filled conversations; [there needs to be] on-going reflection about structural bias. We have been talking about structural issues in which racism and other forms of exclusivity are built into our systems. I think this is the biggest challenge for all of us.”

When Patton talks about inclusivity, she’s addressing a very important distinction with diversity. Roberto Lint Sagarena says, “Diversifying our student bodies doesn’t necessarily do away with issues of difference and the challenges that come with them—being on campus doesn’t automatically make you feel like you’re a part of campus. So how does campus culture change to reflect a pluralism in the student body? Is it a matter of simple assimilation and everybody becomes a part of the same? Or is it an acceptance of difference and a respect for difference, where one can have an affinity group and be with one’s own, but also move beyond that and be accepted by all?”

Leslie Harris, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Emory University, says that these issues are not new, and that she’s struck by the similarities in student demands today and the demands at the dawn of higher education integration 50 years ago.

She points out that many segments of society in the United States have aggressively resegregated and that when students arrive at college they are coming to live in a community that, by design, is just as aggressive in its integration. And there are more students—approximately 14 million 18-24 year olds are in baccalaureate programs now, compared to 2 million in 1949—which means more students from diverse backgrounds. “And you can’t just add and stir,” she says. “It’s the work of institutions to think through what it means for all of these people to come together. You have to be flexible—flexible but strong.”

Katy Smith Abbott, the dean of the College, agrees. Throughout last summer and into the fall, she worked with Miguel Fernandez, Middlebury’s chief diversity officer, and Andi Lloyd, vice president for academic affairs, on an initiative that would help students become more resilient, and she says that it’s dawned on her that these same lessons can be applied to the institution.

“We should hold ourselves institutionally to the same standard,” she says. “What does it mean to be an excellent institution with a deep history and many traditions, some of which are not that great, and to say, ‘You know what? We can be excellent and we can still move from our original shape to something new.’”

“Racism in this country has been very creative,” says senior Debanjan Roychoudhury. “It’s been very willing to change and adapt, so we need to be similarly willing to adapt and be very creative in how we address these issues. That’s who we are! Let’s use our creativity to fundamentally shape the way we think about inclusion.”

Already this year, Patton and the administration have implemented a number of programs and initiatives that she feels will make Middlebury a more inclusive place. She’s engaged a pair of consultant groups to lead diversity workshops with offices that interact most closely with students and to assist in recruiting a diverse faculty applicant pool; she’s facilitated discussions between the Board of Trustees and African American studies scholars (including Leslie Harris), who specialize in structural bias; she’s directed the Athletics Department and the Department of Public Safety to examine inclusive practices in their respective areas; she’s approved the hiring of two full-time counseling fellows for the health center; and she created a new organization (Alliance for an Inclusive Middlebury) of faculty, students, and staff, who are charged with proposing policies and creating spaces across campus to “make sure we are as inclusive as possible in all facets of our lives together.” And Patton and other administrators and facultyhave been spending many hours meeting with students individually and in groups.

During a conversation with Katy Smith Abbott, I remark that the College has begun to address these issues in a far more rapid manner than is typical in higher education, when institutional change is often tracked in geologic time.

She pauses.

“I think it depends on who you’re talking to. I would say yes, that’s the way it feels to me. I think that’s the way it feels for others who work in student life and work in administrative roles where we’re focusing, daily, on tangible programmatic or policy or institutional change,” she says.

“The tension for me is that I’ve heard very consistently from students —all different voices—saying that the College isn’t doing enough. That’s the piece I struggle with. It’s very real for them. Their experience is absolutely genuine and authentic. And what we’re doing is not visible. Somehow it doesn’t feel like change.”

***

Tiff Chang is one student who feels that Middlebury is neither moving fast enough—nor far enough. Chang, a junior Feb from Marin County, California, says that during most of her first year at Middlebury, she was one of those students who thrived. But then, she says, she began to understand that other students were having very different experiences. She points to a collision of events that affected her thinking—national news coverage of Ferguson and her subsequent participation in the Middlebury Ferguson Action Group; friends leaving the College, citing structural oppression; her experience “with queer marginalization on campus and existing as a queer woman of color in student government.” She adds, “And, basically, finding out how deeply imbedded these systems are in all of us.”

She found the town hall meetings to be not only unproductive but a perpetuation of the racism and alienation that students of color were already experiencing on campus. She says there needed to be apologies on both the institutional and personal level, and that the meetings, as constructed, created a space that did not recognize that students of color have different needs than white students.

She quickly acknowledges that the efforts of Patton and the College are sincere, that Patton cares deeply about the issues, and that people are working really hard to implement change. But to her, the efforts are inadequate. She urges Middlebury to think beyond “one-off items like panels and lectures that serve a self-selected audience, and consider systems-based change.” For instance, she wants the College to hold a mandatory annual retreat for faculty and staff that addresses issues of social justice, cultural competency, new teaching pedagogy, slow learning, and more.

Chang, who has been a co-chair of Middlebury’s Community Council this year, has spoken passionately and publicly about these issues that are clearly very important to her, and she says that if the College embraced “a really deep, committed understanding of inclusivity” it could distinguish itself from its peers. “Inclusivity is the new sustainability,” she says. “Let’s employ forward-thinking policies and practices around inclusivity and lead by example.”

It’s hard to argue with the goal, but some whom I’ve talked to worry that there’s not room to disagree about how to set that example, and that rhetoric on campus has quickly moved into a binary “us vs. them” construct. Said one student of color whom I talked to: “I am so relieved that we are moving beyond any one incident and are addressing bigger issues, but I worry that too often experiences are becoming generalized, that people are being put into categories—‘all of you’ or ‘all of us.’ I recognize that a lot of the entrenched problems on this campus are the legacy of systemic oppression, but one of the things I struggle with is how to express solidarity with a group of people, my people, while still expressing myself as an individual.”

This student added: “I think a lot of what’s troubling to a number of students of color is that we’re afraid to throw each other under the bus by saying something wrong because you want to stand in solidarity. But the truth is, it’s impossible to agree on all of these things.”

***

Fear is a word that has come up again and again in my conversations. There’s the fear of being subjected to further racist insults, be they implicit or explicit. (Nia Robinson speaks of returning to her hall one night to find the word “Negroes” written multiple times on a dry-erase board attached to a friend’s door.) And if you’re white there is the fear of saying the wrong thing, of being branded a racist. “Being called a racist is so powerful,” says Miguel Fernandez. “It shuts everything down, the conversation stops. All of a sudden you’re not talking about whatever offended the person of color. You’re arguing about whether someone is or isn’t a racist.”

One white student I spoke to says that she has put herself out there, and she’s been burned; burned to the point she was hesitant to talk to me for this story; she says she’s unlikely to engage with these issues publicly anymore—at least not at Middlebury.

“I recognize that the pain of people in this community is very real, I recognize that the anger is real,” she says. “The sentiments are honest and heartfelt, but I’ve found that it’s too difficult to have constructive conversations because the passion is too great, the anger is too great. I’ve found that too often we each focus on the righteousness of our side of the argument, and then we’re not focusing on the argument itself.”

As an example she points to a series of episodes involving the student newspaper, the Middlebury Campus. In February, a collection of cultural organizations sent an email to the student body calling on the Campus to make amends for “continuously publish[ing] articles that have both subtly and explicitly reinforced the marginalization of several groups” at Middlebury. The letter specifically condemned the decision to publish several op-eds, which contained views that the letter writers felt “actively harm[ed] and systematically silenc[ed] minority groups at the College.”

In response, the Campus editors penned a pair of op-eds (“A Paper for the People” and “A More Inclusive Campus”) in which they defended their decision (and right) to publish opinion pieces—in these cases contributed pieces—that run the risk of offending readers as long as standard journalistic guidelines were enforced. The editors also acknowledged that the paper “suffers acutely from a lack of racially diverse voices” and vowed to find ways to make the newspaper more reflective of the entire community. (Full disclosure: I serve as an advisor to the Campus.)

This issue with the Campus does seem to illustrate a troubling point, perhaps the one opinion shared by most: students are feeling pushed toward silence. There’s the young woman and others who fear the consequences of expressing challenging opinions, and there are the organizations who believe such expression, as it was conducted, systematically silences minority groups.

One student suggests—and others agree—that 90 percent of the student body is not engaging in substantive conversations about race. She says that about 10 percent of the student body could be described as activists when it comes to racial discourse. About 30 percent don’t think about the issue at all. And then there’s 60 percent who are very aware of the tension on campus, but are loathe to speak, at least on any meaningful level; the risk is too great.

So a result can be silence that is just as uncomfortable and perhaps just as damaging. And this worries Nia Robinson. “I know that there are a lot of people who either have good intentions or they empathize with students of color, but they’re not being vocal about it,” she says. “And I so badly want them to speak up because I’m sure they have thoughts and ideas that are completely different from mine, ideas that will challenge me, and that’s a good thing. I come back to a quote from the writer Audre Lorde—‘Your silence will never save you.’”

Shuba Maniram says that she’s found she can have better conversations if she starts by expressing how a statement made her feel, “because somebody may know what it means to be hurt. If I can get you to focus more on how you’ve made me feel instead of characterizing you in a certain way, then our conversation has a relational aspect. If it goes the other way, that’s when people silence themselves.”

But sometimes—often, for many—the burden of these conversations is too great. It’s what Patton referred to when she said, “We must make sure that no single group bears the burden of difference.”

“Yeah, there are times when I have to step back,” admits Maniram. “Ultimately, I’m not here to teach people how to be a better person in the world. I’m here to learn. I’m here to get an education; it shouldn’t be on me to always be educating others.”

Anna Iglitzin ‘17.5

Anna Iglitzin agrees. A junior Feb from Seattle, Iglitzin is part of a cohort of white students who have formed an allyship group. They’ve struggled to come up with a name for their effort—“Whites Against Racism” had been mentioned, but some disliked the militarism of the acronym so they’ve settled on “Wonderbread: White Students for Racial Justice.” They write op-eds for the Campus, addressing issues of “white privilege, written by white students, predominately for white students,” and they hold regular gatherings, where they attempt to engage previously reticent people in uncomfortable conversations. The thinking is that white students will feel less vulnerable expressing their feelings, their confusion, to their white peers; they’ll be more apt to ask questions if they’re not consumed by fear of upsetting someone.

Iglitzin readily admits it’s an imperfect solution. She worries that she’s helped create a homogenous group on campus attempting to educate others in the homogeny about issues she’s never experienced. She’s also worried that she’ll get something wrong, that she’ll incorrectly interpret something that has been told to her by a student of color, that she’ll inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes. But she and others in the group also understand that if this is what it takes to get conversations started and if this effort helps people who are exhausted, who can no longer bear the burden of explanation alone, then it has to be done.

“But success,” says Iglitzin, “is when those people who do talk to us then venture outside of our circle to engage people who don’t look like us.”

Roberto Lint Sagarena shares a similar sentiment when talking about Middlebury’s new multicultural center. On a blustery April day I sat in Sagarena’s office in Carr Hall, home to both the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Anderson Freeman Resource Center (AFC). The latter, which Sagarena also directs, was proposed by students who felt that the College was lacking a venue that specifically supported students from historically underrepresented or marginalized communities; it opened this year, an occurrence Sagarena wryly calls “fortuitous.”

Sagarena says, and students concur, that the AFC has helped demystify the collegiate process by bringing in writing tutors, counselors from the health center, and counselors from the Center for Careers and Internships to meet with students in Carr Hall; not as a substitute for, say, visiting a writing tutor in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research, but as a way of letting students know these resources exist.

And the AFC is a space where alienated students can be themselves. “And that’s great,” says Sagarena. “But it needs to build up to something. I want the Center to serve as a home base for previously alienated students who can then take ownership of the rest of the campus. There needs to be a circulation to the Center; we need to be able to help students expand beyond the AFC, and we need to be able to bring in students who would have never thought about what it means to come from a historically underrepresented community.”

Not long after I talked to Sagarena, the College announced that a popular student-run program called JusTalks would become mandatory for incoming first-year students, beginning next year. I spent a good deal of time talking with Molly McShane, a senior, about JusTalks, which was founded four years ago to provide students with the tools and opportunities to hold conversations about difficult topics.

McShane, who is white, attended the National Cathedral School, an all-girls school in Washington, D.C. She discovered JusTalks as a sophomore at Middlebury, a time when she was struggling to connect with other students who found value and community in conversations about identity and power. JusTalks was her answer—she was able to give voice to her experiences (and learned from listening to others’); she also found a community who shared her interest in talking about difficult subjects. She says that the small group settings build up trust and help foster deeper, more challenging—and also more affirming— conversations over time.

Next year, every first-year student will participate in a JusTalks daylong event during either winter term or spring semester. “Setting the framework in a student’s first year builds a foundation,” says McShane. “It’s a way of saying to every new student, ‘These are the conversations we have and this is the way we treat each other.’”

Adds Smith Abbott: “It can be a space where people don’t have to fear saying the wrong thing as they ask questions and sort through their feelings.”

On this point, I press her about how Middlebury’s faculty can be brought into these discussions. She agrees with the sentiment that for many students of color, the “single most urgent place where they need to see change is in the classroom.” Diversifying the faculty is a work-in-progress, but it’s also the change that will happen the most slowly. So the challenge becomes this: How do you have an impact now?

“As an institution, we need to provide our faculty with opportunities to have the conversation—Why is this important? What kind of discomfort is acceptable and what is not?” she says. “We need to make the resources available for people to have those conversations and, ultimately, to learn, to deepen their skills as classroom facilitators.

“Because they weren’t trained for this,” she adds “and being vulnerable, allowing oneself to be wrong in a space where they are supposed to be the educator is really, really hard.” (More faculty training in this area is another of Patton’s initiatives.)

A year ago, Miguel Fernandez met with department chairs to talk about diversifying the faculty, and he says he was largely met with push back, specifically with how he was defining diversity. The professors asked about expanding the definition to include diversity of religion, diversity of thought. All important, Fernandez told them. But he specifically wanted to talk about the urgent need to increase racial diversity.

“It was different this year,” he says. “I think a large percentage of faculty have found themselves in uncomfortable situations, and they’re looking for the tools to help them navigate this new terrain.”

I have had faculty describe this feeling as being “unmoored,” that at any moment, in teaching their material, they could be treading into quicksand. And many of these faculty members express confusion and dismay about the situation—they say they were once activists themselves and are empathetic to the students’ feelings, yet they find themselves being described as part of the problem.

Smith Abbott is not surprised to hear this. “People care, they’re curious, they’re worried.” She notes the increase in attendance at voluntary workshops and discussion groups, but she also points out that “students rightly say, ‘It’s not everyone yet.’ And we’re trying to figure that out.”

***

Charles Rainey ’19

On a sunny Friday afternoon, I met Charles Rainey for lunch at a Thai restaurant in town. It was a few days before elections for the 2016–17 Student Government Association (SGA), and Rainey was one of four students running for president—the only rising sophomore. As a first-year senator, Rainey has been a presence on the SGA (see p. 43), and he was running on a platform—“a movement,” he calls it—that could upend the very role of student government at Middlebury.

The oldest of five children, Rainey grew up in suburban Atlanta. He attended predominately Black schools and says there was a lot of empowerment in his community, but also a lot of prejudice that existed just beyond his neighborhood. He says that being Black is not monolithic—“there’s not one Black experience”—but his life experience has helped him understand what it’s like to be marginalized.

At lunch, he’s in campaign mode, even though I have no vote and this story will be published after the election. “But this is a movement,” he reminds me with a smile. “Not just an election.”

He says the SGA can’t afford “for another year to go by where conversations are not centered on issues concerning inclusivity.” The SGA must represent all students, not just some, and he believes that not everyone is being represented. But he’s encountered resistance, both as a senator and in his campaign, primarily by people who feel that it’s not the role of student government to debate these issues. And this deeply troubles him. (He describes the focus on issues such as dining hall hours as “inconsequential.”)

To our lunch he wore a T-shirt that bears a Desmond Tutu quote: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” To Rainey, “the SGA has been largely neutral on matters of inclusion and social justice; people have taken a stance that the SGA shouldn’t get involved in these issues. You know what I think about that.”

He has an extensive list of policy proposals—better integrating JusTalks into the first-year experience; the creation of a peer-mentoring program called MiddSibs, in which juniors and seniors are paired up with sophomores and freshmen to form a support network based on shared interests, identities, or backgrounds; mandatory inclusivity training for residential life staff and faculty. While some of the ideas hold more practical promise than others, the point is that Rainey wants to keep the campus’s focus on these issues, wants to keep the pressure on decision makers, and he thinks it should be SGA’s responsibility to do so.

Katy Smith Abbott says that Rainey’s campaign is pushing the student body to question what their government should be. “Are students eager for somebody who really wants to use that office and that student body to push for change in an activist spirit, or do they want it to continue as it has—as a more traditional, if you will, governing body?”

Rainey lost the election, coming in third place. Karina Toy—an Asian American who touted support for a student leadership retreat, more parking spaces for students, and greater SGA transparency—won. During her campaign she agreed with Rainey that inclusivity was an important issue. She said she was supportive of efforts to build a more inclusive community, but she expressed skepticism at how influential the SGA could be.

***

Debanjan Roychoudhury ’16

At the photo shoot for this story, Debanjan Roychoudhury gazed out the large floor-to-ceiling windows in the Axinn Center and watched Rainey jog across the quad, a late arrival to the shoot. To nobody in particular, he said, “Man, he’s gonna burn out.” Roychoudhury would know better than anyone; a few years ago, he was in the same place.

“My sophomore year, I raged against everything,” the senior from Queens tells me one morning while we sat at a table in Crossroads Café. He arrived at Middlebury as an enthusiastic first-year, excited about being in a new place among new people and eager to be involved in as many activities as he could handle. He threw himself into his classwork, joined a number of cultural organizations, and volunteered in the community. He was optimistic, he says, convinced that Middlebury was a place where he could grow and become part of a community that was already becoming special to him. Those feelings didn’t last.

He describes a wave of events that buffeted his optimism. There was the hateful, misogynistic, homophobic letter mailed to a student on campus; there was the time he was at a Halloween party and asked if he was dressed as a basketball player (the six foot four Roychoudhury wasn’t wearing a costume, “though I felt like I had one put on me right then”); there was the time a white student assumed he must love the rapper Jay-Z, presumably because Roychoudhury has dark skin and was wearing a knit Yankees cap, attire favored by the artist; there was the time he attended a campus discussion centered on the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a Michigan law banning the use of racial criteria in college admissions, and he heard a faculty member say that now Black students at Michigan would know they deserved to be there.

“So it became my job to prove to people that I was smart enough to be here, that I was earning my scholarship, that I had earned my place,” he says. “And I fought like hell to prove that.” What felled him, he says, was intransigence. He felt as though he and others were pushing and pushing to talk about these issues and no one was listening; the AFC was two years away from opening, and Roychoudhury felt like he was drifting away. Burnout followed, the burnout he worries about for Charles Rainey. He focused on getting by—getting by and getting out.

Now, though, he feels differently. “I woke up one day and realized that none of this has defeated me. As a student of color, I belong here just as much as anyone else; this is my school just as much as it’s anyone else’s.”

I asked him what prompted this realization, and he thought for a minute. “Maybe it’s as simple as honoring people like Martin Henry Freeman and Marianne Anderson,” he says, gesturing to his backpack which features button pins with the likenesses of the two Middlebury alums, students of color who graduated in the late 1800s and went on to exemplary careers in education.

“Nothing gives me more pride than thinking about what they accomplished. And they are Middlebury,” he says. “Now think about what life was like for them, think about their norm. My grandparents lived under colonial rule. Compare their norm to mine; compare Freeman’s and Anderson’s norm to mine. It’s different, right? It’s better, right? Change is happening if we keep working, if we come together. Sometimes it’s hard to see, but it is.”

Roychoudhury stands up from the table and says he needs to get to class, but he has one last thing he wants to tell me.

“Did you know that when Martin Henry Freeman walked at graduation, the other students held back? They wouldn’t walk with him. And then one guy stepped forward and linked arms with him, and they walked side-by-side in the procession. When we look back on this moment—and I believe it’s a big chapter in our story, and we will be looking back on it—who is going to stand and link arms and walk with their brothers and sisters?”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/lets-talk-about-race/feed/4noAs racial conflict unfolds on college campuses across the country, Middlebury wrestles with tensions of its own. Middlebury MagazineAs racial conflict unfolds on college campuses across the country, Middlebury wrestles with tensions of its own. middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/lets-talk-about-race/Stand and Deliverhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/RFsskmjYKRc/
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Rana Abdelhamid ’15 has learned to stare down bigotry and xenophobia. And now she’s teaching a generation of American women to do the same.

In an elementary school classroom on the third floor of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, Rana Abdelhamid ’15 is teaching a group of women how to yell. It’s not an easy task. Abdelhamid demonstrates the self-defense move again. She settles into a fighting stance, her right foot back, her left leg bent slightly. She raises her fists in front of her face, which is framed with a royal blue headscarf. Twisting at the waist, she launches a powerful punch with a loud, sharp “KI-YAH!”

“On my count,” she says, urging the nine women in front of her to try. The women are part of a daylong workshop hosted by WISE—the Women’s Initiative for Self-Empowerment—an organization Abdelhamid founded six years ago, when she was just 17 years old. WISE teaches self-defense, leadership, and social entrepreneurship skills to Muslim women, a task that has grown even more urgent for Abdelhamid, now 23, in the face of a spike in hate crimes against Muslims and increasingly strident anti-Muslim rhetoric.

“One,” Abdelhamid shouts, and the room dissolves into embarrassed giggles. Only one student yells without any self-consciousness: six-year-old Kenza, in her heart-print dress and pink-and-white-striped headscarf, who is attending the workshop with her mother.

“This is important,” Abdelhamid says, gathering the women around her. They range in age from teens to 40-somethings. Some wear hijabs, the traditional Muslim headscarf; others don’t. “As women, we’re told not to be loud,” she says. “We are programmed to be respectful, to be nice, to smile. We giggle, even when we are threatened. I needed to use these self-defense skills once,” she tells the class. “But I didn’t have the confidence to use them.”

***

“I felt a tug at my hijab,” Abdelhamid begins. She has told this story many times in the last seven years; it has lost none of its power in the retelling. Abdelhamid’s animated features still as she recalls walking alone down a New York City street. A man approached her from behind and tried to rip off her hijab. “I remember the hate in his eyes. I felt very vulnerable and very alone,” she says.

The physical fear came first. Her attacker was enormous in the eyes of the petite 16-year-old. She ran. When she was safe, she locked herself in a bathroom and cried. Then came another, bigger fear, an uncertainty about her place in American society: “Why do people see Muslims in this light? Does everyone see me this way? Why does this happen?”

Abdelhamid knew such discrimination and hatred existed. She had been an eight-year-old Muslim-American New Yorker on 9/11 and had seen the attacks and suspicion the Muslim community endured in its wake. At 16, she had just begun wearing the hijab, a personal expression of her culture and religion that also made her a visible target for those who misunderstood her faith. She did not know how to counteract that hate, but she did know how to defend herself.

From the age of seven, Abdelhamid had studied Shotokan karate. Her parents had enrolled their shy daughter in the class to give her the confidence she needed to stand up for herself in the sometimes-chaotic environment of her New York City public school. In the aftermath of her attack, Abdelhamid embraced karate as a tool of self-empowerment and of self-defense; today she holds a black belt.

Karate made Abdelhamid feel less vulnerable, but she still felt alone. She wondered: were other Muslim girls facing the same issues? As a teenager, Abdelhamid was preternaturally attuned to the importance of community. Her mother is a human rights activist and from a young age, Abdelhamid had seen the impact of domestic violence in her community in New York, where she was born, and in Alexandria, Egypt, where her parents grew up. When she was attacked, Abdelhamid had been walking to her volunteer job at a domestic violence shelter.

Those two pieces—self-defense and community building—formed the foundation blocks of WISE, an organization that began with a very personal goal: to help one teenage girl heal.

The idea of a 16-year-old girl teaching self-defense to her peers was not well received at first. Abdelhamid remembers pitching the project to an imam at a Queens community center: “He laughed.” He explained that the center already had classes for Muslim women; they were all religious education classes. “I learned later that after I left he actually ripped up my poster,” she says. The rejection only emboldened her—that “activist spark,” she says now. She was determined to strengthen her argument. She began researching other organizations, gathering data, and seeking out mentors and allies.

Her perseverance paid off. The first WISE course was held the summer of 2010 in Brooklyn. Abdelhamid was nervous as her father drove her to the class; she had never done anything like this before. More than a dozen teenaged girls attended, and Abdelhamid says, “it was that sisterhood that I have always wanted to find.”

That first eight-week workshop combined self-defense training with conversation; the girls had a safe space to share their experiences of being Muslim women in New York. For Abdelhamid, the self-defense portion of the class is key. It attracts a wide variety of women—those who wear the hijab and those who do not; those who have identified as Muslims throughout their lives and those new to the faith; those who consider themselves feminist and those who do not—which makes the conversations among the women richer. “We have debates in the class and opportunity for learning,” Abdelhamid says. “It has definitely challenged my assumptions and my beliefs.”

At the end of the workshop, Abdelhamid thought that she was done—“I felt better,” she recalls thinking. Then she got a phone call from one of the girls in the class. The girl was in tears. She had been on a New York City bus. “Why don’t you go back to where you came from?” the bus driver had demanded as she fumbled with her Metro Card. “Because of the class, I knew how to respond,” the girl told Abdelhamid. She recorded the bus number and knew there were people she could ask for help. “How do we keep this going?” she asked.

“That was the moment for me,” says Abdelhamid. “This is not about me. It’s not about me at all.’”

***

“Google ‘images of Muslim women,’” Abdelhamid says. “I can actually do it for you right now.” She reaches for her smartphone and quickly scans through a dozen or so text messages before entering the search term. Of the first 20 pictures that appear, only three show women in hair-covering hijabs. The other 17 photos are of women in black niqabs, a face-covering veil, or black burqas, a full-body veil.

On this day in late March, Abdelhamid sits in a coffee shop in Cambridge. She is dressed stylishly in a long, bell-shaped black skirt, brown boots, and a patterned shawl, which she gathers in her lap. Her personal style is on display in every detail, from her chunky rings and her penciled eyebrows to her hijab. Today it’s a burgundy scarf—a complement to her lipstick—tied closely to her head in a style she likes to call “the urban turban.” “This is not what I look like,” she says, gesturing to the dominant image of Muslim women displayed on her phone. “We are trying to diversify and elevate the narrative.”

WISE began as a self-empowerment effort—first for Abdelhamid and then for the 500 women who have participated in WISE’s programs to date. The organization now has volunteer-staffed chapters in six cities in the U.S. and Europe; some workshops last a couple of hours, while some last months. The media has embraced WISE—at the recent Boston workshop, two camera crews filmed the self-defense class—and slowly, so have Muslim organizations that formerly laughed at the concept. Once a premed student turned international politics and economics major, Abdelhamid is now pursuing a master’s in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and hopes to turn WISE into a full-time job upon graduation.

As WISE’s profile has grown, it has also become a platform for educating the public about Muslim women. It’s a path Abdelhamid treads cautiously; she does not want to be seen as a spokeswoman for some 800 million Muslim women. But neither can she stay silent.

When Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States; when his Republican rival Ted Cruz suggested patrolling Muslim neighborhoods; when ISIS was connected to attacks in Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino, Abdelhamid’s phone rang. “I get messages all the time, after every attack, from Muslim girls who want to know: I am wearing the hijab. Should I take it off?”

Abdelhamid tells the callers that taking the hijab off is as personal a decision as putting it on, that each woman must make a decision with regard to her safety and stress levels. Abdelhamid has made her choice: “I am defiant. I am going to wear it and I am going to be proud.”

***

As she works to expand WISE, Abdelhamid has introduced a new project: Hijabis of New York. Inspired by the popular Humans of New York blog, Hijabis of New York documents the experiences of women who wear the hijab—in New York and in cities around the world—with a portrait and a one-question interview.

For Abdelhamid, the Hijabis of New York is a digital version of what she calls the “hijabi nod,” that brief moment of recognition and connection between two women wearing hijabs as they pass each other on the street. The project showcases the diversity of women who choose to wear the hijab, even as it builds a virtual community among them.

The questions Abdelhamid and the project’s other photographers pose to these women on the street are thought provoking. She blanches at answering one herself: “What are you struggling with at the moment?”

On the blog, struggle is a common theme. “With staying true to myself and being who I want to be,” says one woman in a hijab painted with watercolor pastels. “Lately, I’ve been struggling with my faith,” admits another in a royal purple hijab.

Abdelhamid pauses, starts, stops. She’s struggling with the same things her classmates are: balancing her class work with her social life; finding her own identity in her 20s; realizing her big ambitions.

She starts again: “I’m really struggling with the hateful rhetoric. It’s hard. I really, really feel American. I feel very proud to be American, and then when I read these things…it makes you feel very vulnerable. It makes you feel like a second-class citizen. These are things that I’m grappling with and that’s hard because I’m leading an organization that is teaching people not to feel that way.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/stand-and-deliver/feed/0noRana Abdelhamid ’15 has learned to stare down bigotry and xenophobia. And now she’s teaching a generation of American women to do the same.Middlebury MagazineRana Abdelhamid ’15 has learned to stare down bigotry and xenophobia. And now she’s teaching a generation of American women to do the same.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/05/16/stand-and-deliver/The Gospel According to Tedhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/Xpk6-MWMdEs/
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How Ted King ’05 and his entrepreneurial cohort of outdoor enthusiasts seek to upend the market for athletic fuel.

Strapping on her skis and moving slowly—by her standards—through a warm-up at Lake Placid’s Nordic Center, Heather Mooney ’15 does one lap around the stadium, then another, and finally heads out with her teammates for an abbreviated jaunt through the woods. It’s two days before the 2015 NCAA Ski Championships, and Mooney is exhausted. She’s battling a cold, which is sapping her energy at just the wrong time, and she doesn’t have the luxury of taking it easy. She’s running low in another department, as well.

“I have one more,” she says, opening a pouch on her blue waist belt and pulling out a packet of maple syrup. “We have one last late-day race, so the timing worked out perfectly.” Marketed as an “all-natural athletic fuel” under the label UnTapped, this particular packet of pure maple syrup is no homespun remedy but a relatively new product being touted as a natural alternative to synthetic sports gels. The founder of the company and self-professed maple syrup proselytizer—“I’ve been preaching the gospel of maple syrup for years”—is Ted King ’05, a cyclist who competed professionally for nearly a decade.

A native New Englander (a rarity in professional cycling), King earned a quirky reputation on the cycling circuit for being the “syrup guy,” never failing to pack a couple of gallons of the sweet stuff and always having some on hand at mealtime. “It’s not commonplace in Europe,” he says, and what is available tends to be the corn-syrup-based alternatives, which King dismisses as fake syrup. But it wasn’t until a training ride in 2012 that King realized maple syrup’s potential as an energy supplement.

The previous summer, King and fellow pro cyclist Tim Johnson had successfully cycled the length of Vermont’s Route 100—dubbed “200 on 100” for the 200-mile trek—and had set their sights on another 200-mile ride: from Burlington, Vermont, to Portland, Maine. In advance of the new challenge, playfully called “200 not on 100,” King and Johnson got the word out about the ride and as they pedaled across northern New England, they were greeted by cheering crowds along the way. As they neared the halfway point, while zipping along the Kancamagus Highway in New Hampshire, they encountered a man waiting on the side of the road—with gift baskets for each rider.

Among various sundries, such as a 16-oz. can of beer, was a mini-container of maple syrup. In an attempt to replace at least some of the 1,000 calories per hour they were burning—and stay sober—they downed the syrup.

“That was probably the first time I really, truly chugged maple syrup on a ride,” says King. The performance benefits seemed clear, he adds, citing a noticeable energy boost. Why not try and replicate it? King began stopping at mom-and-pop syrup stands along his bike routes, buying novelty-size nips and tucking them in his jersey.

“It wasn’t the safest thing in the world,” he says of the glass vials that would surely shatter during a fall. So, aiming to avoid maiming, he started looking for alternative packaging. At farmers’ markets he would show syrup makers his traditional energy gels and ask if they could get their product into a similarly manageable form. He was met with stares of confusion and sent on his merry way. For more than a year, no one seemed to take him seriously. Then King pitched the idea to Andrew Gardner, a friend and amateur cyclist.

At the time, Gardner was the Nordic ski coach at Middlebury, and he had his own syrup stories. Vermont ski racing has more than its fair share of traditions, one of which involves handing out jugs of syrup as podium prizes. “I saw the winners from Saturday’s race chugging maple syrup and then skiing long distances on Sunday,” Gardner says, an observation seconded by Heather Mooney. “Chugging syrup is definitely a thing,” she confirms, especially on the men’s side. It’s a practice that Gardner had noticed but had never really thought about—until King approached him with his crazy idea.

***

Andrew Gardner was not only enthusiastic about King’s idea; he proved adept at solving several of the logistical problems King had encountered, such as sourcing the syrup itself. He introduced King to Roger Brown, Doug Brown, Tim Kelley, and Jimmy Cochran—first cousins who are descended from Vermont skiing royalty. The Skiing Cochrans, as the family is known, have competed internationally for two generations. The four offspring of patriarch Mickey all skied in Winter Olympics (daughter Barbara Ann won gold in 1972), while the next generation has placed six family members on the U.S. ski team. Mickey and his wife, Ginny, also built a small ski area on their property in Richmond, Vermont. Now operated as a nonprofit, this literal mom-and-pop ski hill, with its three lifts and eight slopes, is a bucolic hive of family activity each winter. It is also surrounded by 20,000 maple trees, and in 2010, four of Mickey and Ginny’s 10 grandchildren started tapping the trees and opened a sugarhouse that would produce their signature Slopeside Syrup.

The Cochran cousins loved the idea of syrup-as-energy-fuel, and with King and Gardner, the cohort began scouring the country to find a partner who could package Slopeside’s product in small, on-the-go packets. (The supplier remains a closely guarded secret, says King.)

Next, they turned to crowdfunding platform Indiegogo, where they crafted a campaign that was less a charity plea and more a pre-order system. (“We really wanted this to be a proof of concept,” explains Gardner.) The initial ask was $35,000, and in the days before the launch, King was approving drafts of the site while lying face down on a massage table between stages of the Tour de France.

The campaign blew past its goal, raising more than $50,000, which would fund production of 100,000 packets—though the fledgling company soon learned that there was greater demand for UnTapped than they had anticipated, particularly as customers kept finding new uses for the product. “We’ve heard of expectant mothers using it in labor,” says King. Paramedics have also used UnTapped to treat diabetes, and people report taking it along to diners so they don’t have to use “artificial” brands on their pancakes and waffles.

Naturally, the UnTapped team swears by its product. “It offers the same nutritional benefits found in the very calculated, heavily supplemented stuff, but maple syrup is entirely natural,” King says, citing a laundry list of resulting benefits: antioxidants, low glycemic index (54), and high magnesium content, to name a few. For others though, the jury is still out. Burlington-based nutritionist Kimberly Evans, for instance, loves the idea of UnTapped and even bought it as a stocking stuffer for her partner last Christmas, but she isn’t fully convinced by the science. “I would really have to see some evidence-based research for me to be comfortable recommending maple syrup,” she says. Nonetheless, UnTapped has been flying off the shelves.

According to Gardner, UnTapped is doing well financially, though not to the degree that he, King, or the Cochrans can forgo any other source of income. And there’s still the risk of falling victim to the fad-prone natural foods industry. “We don’t want to become a stop on the trendy-sport highway,” he cautions, conceding that there is a bit of a novelty aura to the product. At least for now, though, the UnTapped upswing continues. You can find it for sale in L.L.Bean stores, and Olympic distance runner Ruben Sanca is the latest endurance athlete to endorse the product. “We’re an actual, legitimate business,” says Gardner. “It’s still one of these things where I turn around and say, this is crazy.”

About halfway through a campus discussion on cultural appropriation and community standards, students, when given the microphone, began by introducing themselves.

Hi, I’m Annie. Hello, I’m Victor. Hi, I’m Peter.

At first I thought folks were being polite, demonstrating that while we’re a small campus, it’s not safe to assume everyone knows everyone else. However, it was during the third introduction—made by Peter, I believe—that motive became more fully articulated.

I’m glad we’re identifying ourselves by name before offering our opinions, he said. It’s the antithesis of the anonymous statements we’re seeing on Yik Yak.

Yik Yak is a social media app, popular with students, that allows users to post their thoughts anonymously. Much of the discourse consists of sophomoric humor, short queries—Is the Grille delivering right now?—and lighthearted complaints. On occasion, someone voices a genuine plea for help and receives responses just as genuine. Several times I’ve read of people expressing emotional anguish and their peers offering near-immediate assistance, which is comforting. But then there is the nastiness—the personal attacks uttered from beneath a cloak of anonymity against individuals and groups. By intent, these remarks inflict pain and fear on those at whom they are directed. And it has the more global effect of tearing apart the trust and respect that holds a community together.

In our fall issue, Dena Simmons ’05 wrote beautifully about race and our shared humanity. Near the piece’s conclusion, she challenged us to “be compassionate…to be open to other experiences…to learn to accept others and ourselves for everything we are—and everything we are not.” That begins when we hold ourselves to account. That begins when we respectfully and accountably exchange our views.

My name is Matt. Please join me in this conversation.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/03/28/uncloaked/feed/1no&#160; About halfway through a campus discussion on cultural appropriation and community standards, students, when given the microphone, began by introducing themselves. Hi, I’m Annie. Hello, I’m Victor. Hi, I’m Peter. At first I thought folks were being Middlebury Magazine&#160; About halfway through a campus discussion on cultural appropriation and community standards, students, when given the microphone, began by introducing themselves. Hi, I’m Annie. Hello, I’m Victor. Hi, I’m Peter. At first I thought folks were being polite, demonstrating that while we’re a small campus, it’s not safe to assume everyone knows everyone else. [&#8230;]middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/03/28/uncloaked/Old Chapel: Vibrant Research at a Liberal Arts Institutionhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/9PPhgcVum2U/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/25/old-chapel-vibrant-research-at-a-liberal-arts-institution/#respondThu, 25 Feb 2016 21:20:24 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14583One of education’s great aims is to help students see beyond a world of black-and-white and to perceive and be comfortable with the various shades of gray surrounding us. We teach our students to consider ambiguities in scientific, historical, moral, and many other forms of reasoning; in artistic critique; in the digital worlds we all now inhabit.

And yet, ironically, we still encounter black-and-white perceptions within the world of higher education. One particularly tenacious perception is the difference between the aims of a liberal arts institution and those of a research university. I spoke to a prominent foundation leader who had recently led a meeting between faculty and administrators from liberal arts colleges and research universities, and he said, “Despite their good intentions, everyone still stereotyped the other side, and we at the foundation still had to interpret each side to the other.”

These stereotypes he referred to are ones we encounter all the time: liberal arts colleges are only about teaching and universities are only about research. Universities are supposedly filled with professors who have little time for their undergraduates’ needs. Professors divide their attention between their graduate students and their research—with the classroom a distant third in their priorities. Liberal arts professors, on the other hand, supposedly spend all their time teaching and never think about research. They seldom look up from their pedagogical tasks to engage the outside world, and they’re not committed to intellectual inquiry except as character formation for the young.

But counterevidence of these stereotypes exists all around us. Universities house extraordinary teachers who frequently are also top researchers in their fields. And, as you will read in this issue of Middlebury Magazine, liberal arts colleges have extraordinary researchers active in their fields and pushing the boundaries of knowledge in exciting ways. Nowhere is this more true than at Middlebury College.

Indeed, I believe liberal arts colleges have the potential to rethink and reclaim some of the original purposes of research. So many researchers I have known in higher
education—no matter the institutional context—have said to me, “What I really wish I could work on is this question, not the question I know will be funded or the question the current trends in the field suggest I ask.”

Because research foundations don’t drive the funding structure of liberal arts colleges, researchers in liberal arts often can work on research without being burdened by its “fundability.” They’re not constrained by intellectual fashions, nor the ability of their inquiries to fulfill the common good. While all institutions have to pay attention to questions of funding, larger intellectual contexts, and peer review, liberal arts institutions exist in a space that encourages independence from trends—and thus, creativity.

In addition, because we often exist in smaller, more intense communities of inquiry, we have opportunities to think about and conduct interdisciplinary research in exciting ways.And because we work in closer proximity to other disciplines than do our peers in research universities, we’re generally much more interdisciplinary in our classrooms—something we can take advantage of in our research as well.

Finally, the research we conduct can be more responsive to the questions of local concerns. It’s no accident that alumni, students, and townspeople collaborated on the hydrogen-powered tractor created one winter term. Nor is it an accident that the levels of toxicity in our region’s lake water concern students in our School of the Environment and our science classes. And it’s no accident that some of ourclassics professors teach students to research the ancient world in part by bringing them to the Vermont legislature to see the continuity of certain democratic traditions.

Research can and should be a vibrant part of our lives in an institution like Middlebury
College. What’s more, Middlebury can be a place for a different kind of research that inspires colleagues at different kinds of institutions in higher education—and that breaks stereotypes along the way.

It’s not every chaplain who gets to christen a 7,800-ton, 377-foot newborn. But that’s what Lieutenant Commander Daniel Curtis ’87 found himself doing in Newport News, Virginia, on September 6, 2014, for the dedication of the USS John Warner, a nuclear-powered fast-attack submarine, with hundreds in attendance, including the five-term U.S. senator.

“Open our eyes, we pray, to see Your handiwork in every bolt turned, every plate welded, in every wire spliced, every drop of paint spread over the ship that rises before us, as surely as we see Your handiwork in the seas she sails,” Curtis said in his invocation.

An ordained minister since 1992, Curtis began a second career as an officer in the U.S. Navy Chaplain Corps in 2007, just under the corps’ cutoff age of 42. He has been deployed with Seabees and Marines in peacetime and combat operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq, including seven months onboard a guided-missile cruiser.

These days Curtis presides over a congregation of 1,500 seamen and 10 submarines as chaplain of Submarine Squadron 6 in Norfolk, Virginia. Most of this work is done at surface level. While a full deployment on a submarine might run six months, there simply aren’t enough chaplains to go around—the total number in the corps is less than 850—and when he does take his ministry underwater, Curtis will typically join a vessel at its last port of deployment for the journey home. “The camaraderie and sense of community is far deeper when you’ve been to sea with somebody than when you’re just visiting them,” he says.

As a double major in political science and religion at Middlebury, Curtis was considering going into the ministry as four generations of family before him had—“It was a combination of appreciation for my dad’s legacy [Lawrence Curtis ’57, a retired pastor and political science major] and my grandfather [Commander Ralph Curtis, who served in the Navy for 20 years]”—but he wasn’t convinced that pure parish life was his calling.

After completing seminary school in the Chicago area, Curtis received his first pastoral assignment with a United Methodist church in Columbus, Ohio. That was followed by a five-and-a-half-year stint at Grace United Methodist Church in Lima, Ohio, pork-rind capital of the United States and “a small city with all the big-city challenges,” including drug and alcohol addiction and a host of other problems from depression to mental health and family issues.

It was good preparation for the Navy Chaplain Corps. “Probably 80 percent of my counseling isn’t specifically religious,” says Curtis, who teaches a class every Wednesday for new enlistees to address the challenges of submarine life. “There’s a reason why submariners get paid a little extra: the danger, the cramped quarters, the limitations on communications with loved ones ashore. A number of things make it a particularly challenging lifestyle in the submarine world.”

For all the situations he has faced on the job, none was more difficult than the suicide of his son, 20-year-old Jonathan, in Toledo in May 2012. Curtis was stationed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, when word reached him of Jonathan’s death. After coming home for the funeral, he was reassigned to a pool of chaplains for smaller ships in the Norfolk area prior to getting his current assignment in July 2013.

While Curtis and other chaplains are strictly noncombatants and do not carry weapons—“it’s not ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’”—they are serving a military community. And some people, he admits, don’t like that idea. From his perspective, Curtis sees “a profound need and a really exciting mission field” to carry out his military chaplaincy. “I don’t like war, either,” he says, “but I very much like the opportunity to walk with people who are
serving their country.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/17/pursuits-the-chaplain/feed/1noHis grandfather was an officer in the Navy and his father was a pastor. Dan Curtis '87 is both.Middlebury MagazineHis grandfather was an officer in the Navy and his father was a pastor. Dan Curtis '87 is both.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/17/pursuits-the-chaplain/On a Sea of Stonehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/LGqXD7Fh8BM/
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The top of Murdoch Mountain, in the Uinta chain in northeastern Utah, is about 11,200 feet, which is modest by the standards of the Uintas: the state’s highest point is Kings Peak at 13,258 feet. Murdoch is popular for hikers because of its accessibility: you can drive, via Mirror Lake Highway, to Bald Mountain Pass, which at 10,700 feet is only about 500 vertical from Murdoch’s top.

That’s where, in July, I met up with Jeff Munroe, a professor of geology at Middlebury, and two students: Sam O’Keefe ’16, from Baltimore, Maryland, and Luna Wasson ’17, from Wilson, Wyoming. Munroe has been hiking, climbing, and conducting research in the Uintas for two decades. And for much of that time he’s been bringing students to learn about this east-west stretch of the Rocky Mountains.

In recent years, Munroe’s research has focused on dust deposition in the Uintas. The long-term goal: to learn how windborne dust affects the geo-ecology of alpine systems. He’s investigating soil formation (also known as pedogenesis); the albedo—or reflectivity—of the snowpack, and the impact on snowmelt; the composition and source of the dust on the mountains. And, with the help of core samples from Uinta lakes, Munroe is studying how dust deposition has changed over time due both to climate change—a drier climate in the Southwest implies more dust in the mountains—and human activity in the lowland basins, including fossil fuel extraction and mining.

On this July day, Munroe and the students are heading to a passive dust collector not far from Murdoch’s summit, one of four that the Middlebury geologist deployed in the Uintas a few years back. From Bald Mountain Pass, we hike through a beautiful alpine meadow, which quickly becomes a tricky, steep talus with rocks ranging from toaster to refrigerator size. They look stable but often shift under your feet. Trekking poles come in handy.

As the terrain flattens near the top of Murdoch, we find ourselves on a felsenmeer—German for sea of stone. This is a relatively flat expanse of rock broken into loose pieces, and it’s typical of the summits throughout the Uintas. The last time glaciers moved through, the peaks were not covered in ice and so for thousands of years they’ve been subject to freezing and thawing, which reduces the top few feet of the rock surface to rubble.

The dust collector is a short walk from a summit cairn, on the shoulder of the mountain, where it’s less likely to be disturbed. Just below the site is a small snowfield. The collectors—built by Tony Desautels, a scientific machinist in Middlebury’s Science Tech Support Services—are about two feet square and made of clear plastic. The plastic has five V-shaped channels with holes near the top that allow excess water to drain out. The channels are closed on both ends and have on one side removable black plastic caps. When deployed in the field, each channel is filled to two-thirds its depth with black, rounded glass—pieces about the size of Peanut M&M’s. Dust collects in the channels and is trapped beneath the glass pieces, where some of it stays until the team comes to collect it each year.

The collection process is almost alarmingly low-tech. First Munroe, O’Keefe, and Wasson remove the glass pieces from each channel and put them in plastic bags. Then they put the water and dust from each channel in a plastic bottle—several bottles for each collector—with a plastic spoon and a turkey baster. Then, one by one, they remove the caps on the channels and rinse each channel with purified water to capture more dust and add it to that channel’s bottle. They use a toothbrush in the final rinse to make sure all the dust gets into the bottle. Then they seal the bottles and secure them in their backpacks for the hike down. They put the collector as close as possible to where it had been, and put the glass pieces back into the channels. At the end of the trip, they will ship these bottles back to Middlebury, where the dust will be removed and analyzed.

With the collection process complete, we head back down to Bald Mountain Pass and then drive deeper into the Uinta-Wasatch-Cache National Forest on Mirror Lake Highway before turning off onto increasingly bumpy and rocky U.S. Forest Service “roads” to our campsite/staging area for the next hike. Munroe and the students are in a huge white four-door turbo-diesel pickup Munroe rented for the trip. He calls it the hovercraft for the way it handles the bad roads. My Jeep Patriot rental can’t make it past the washouts on the last quarter mile to the campsite. So I pack my tent and other gear in a huge backpack I borrowed from the Middlebury Mountain Club gear room and make the short trek to the riverbank.

We set up camp by the fast-rushing East Fork of the Blacks Fork River, a Green River tributary. We have a tailgate dinner, with Munroe and the students enjoying the peanut butter/noodle/vegetable creation he cooked over a gas camp stove. Munroe and his wife, Diane, the coordinator for community-based environmental studies at the College’s Franklin Environmental Center, are vegans, and many students talk about the wonderful meals they’ve had at the Munroe household.

When it’s still light, we settle into our tents for the night, because we plan to rise at 4 a.m. to set out on the long hike to a dust collector just south of Bald Mountain. (Another Bald Mountain, it turns out: not the one visible from the aforementioned Bald Mountain Pass.) The early start is to ensure we’re back below tree line before the late afternoon thunderstorms.

*

In 2001 Jeff Munroe joined the Middlebury faculty as an assistant professor of geology. He graduated from Bowdoin College and earned his MS and PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His work in the Uintas began as a collaboration with the Forest Service in 1996, when he was a graduate student, and was the basis for his doctoral dissertation. He’s also done research on climate change in northeastern Nevada, glacier retreat in Glacier National Park, and the evolution of lake environments and mountain soils in northern New England. Now a full professor, he teaches courses on geomorphology, environmental geology, paleolimnology, and arctic and alpine environments.

Munroe’s general area of research is the Quaternary period, which ranges from the present to about 2.6 million years ago—a tiny sliver of time given that our planet is 4.5 billion years old. “Geology is reading a book with most of the pages torn out,” he says. “The evidence, the story, the information is constantly being deleted by erosion and other processes, so the further back you go, more and more is missing. Working on the Quaternary—relatively recent stuff—the stories you can tell, the data that you can accumulate: it’s just richer, because less of the record has been lost. Not that it’s easier, because plenty of the record has still been lost, but you can ask tougher questions, because you’re dealing with a more complete record.”

Like his colleagues in Middlebury’s geology department, Munroe spends a lot of time in the field and much of that time with students. “That’s something I did as an undergrad at Bowdoin,” he says. “I went to Alaska for five or six weeks with my advisor, and that put the hook in me pretty good about doing field-based geology. And I just always had it in my mind that in a perfect world I’d get into a situation where I could provide those types of opportunities for undergraduates. And beginning my very first year here, I’ve been able to do that. It helps build great relationships with students, as you might imagine. The conversations you have when you’re together all the time, when you’re dealing with the uncertainties and unpredictability of fieldwork: you really become a team pretty quickly. And I love to be able to provide that for students. I think that type of immersive learning in the field has no parallel. You can’t fake it. You can try with a three- or four-hour lab during a regular semester. But, boy, when you’re out there testing hypotheses every day, coming up with new ones every night, you see science in real time.”

*

At 4:30 the next morning, we’re fording the Blacks Fork, which runs cold and fast over round, slippery rocks, and is just over knee deep. Munroe had described this hike to me as 15 miles, but it turns out to be 17, including 3,000 feet of elevation gain that tops out at 12,500 feet. Wearing headlamps to illuminate our path, we start up a series of switchbacks that cross a steep rocky slope through thick woods still soaked from overnight rains. On the second switchback, we hear a rumble of thunder, which Munroe says is not a good sign. Thunder in the morning often means a long, stormy day in the mountains. But we decide to press on until we get to the tree line and can see more of the sky.

By the time we reach the top of the switchbacks, the woods are waking up, filling with birdsong. The trail levels and smooths out for half a mile or so through a beautiful softwood glade. Then things get steep again as we hike through a huge pile of rocks, which has a stream running below it. The trail zigzags through the rocks—we found our way by looking for cairns at the turns—and then the terrain opens up again, displaying fewer trees and some marshy sections.

But before long we’re back in a steep and rocky section, now above the tree line, and stop for breakfast on the shoulder of Bald Mountain at around 11,000 feet. It’s overcast, with a chilly breeze. Having discovered early on that my idea of a comfortable pace doesn’t match those of the others—Munroe is tall, trim, and extremely fit; O’Keefe is a national collegiate champion in cyclocross; Wasson is a member of the Panther Nordic ski team—I arrive a bit late. From our breakfast perch, the terrain looks friendlier. I ask Munroe if we’re halfway, and he says that’s probably about right. He adds that you can see our destination, pointing south toward a peak in the middle distance. Since you can see for at least 20 miles in almost every direction, this is not terribly comforting. But breakfast—Alpineaire’s granola and blueberries; just add cold water—could not have tasted better.

*

Last spring, Munroe taught one of the geology department’s most popular entry-level courses: Environmental Geology. He makes sure even those beginning students get their time in the field.

One afternoon, I tagged along as Munroe and his class piled into vans and made the short drive over to the Middlebury River where it enters East Middlebury. We parked just past the new Route 125 bridge that spans the East Middlebury Gorge, and Munroe and the students pulled on waders and descended the steep slope to the river.

They were measuring the water’s volume and the speed of its flow. Before leaving campus, Munroe had instructed one student to grab four oranges from the dining halls—“The entire success of the lab depends on those oranges,” he said—for reasons that weren’t, at first, clear to me.

Once in the water, the students created a cross-section of the river, running a long tape measure across and using yardsticks to measure depth every foot along the tape. Then they stretched two tapes across the stream 20 feet apart and floated oranges between them, measuring the time it took the fruit to travel the distance at different points.

Having collected the data on water volume and flow, Munroe and the class climbed back up to the bridge, crossed to the river’s north side, and walked half a mile upstream. Munroe discussed how the gorge was formed, noting the volume and speed of water required to carve the gorge out of the quartzite bedrock.

He pointed out round dimples on the surfaces of some large rocks in the river: these were percussion marks and smaller rocks hitting the larger ones caused them. Typically they’re found on the upstream side. If they’re on the downstream side it means the river flow has moved or flipped over the rock. He asked his students to find the largest rock that appeared to have been flipped, and they discovered an enormous one—big enough for several students to stand on. Estimating the weight and the flow required to flip it, Munroe said, suggested it would have taken a once-in-10,000-years flood.

Munroe is clearly in his element in the field, whether in the rivers and streams of Vermont or the extremes of the West, and his smile was almost ever-present through the afternoon. On the way back to the vans, he talked about how great it is to have places like the gorge so close to campus. “It’s a wonderful place to teach geology,” he said. “You can just go outside.”

*

Back in Utah, the next bit of the hike goes slightly downhill through a beautiful, wide alpine tundra covered with grass and wildflowers. But before long we’re on a gradual climb interrupted every so often by steep slopes with lots of exposed rock. I keep thinking every pitch has to be the last one. And eventually, when I nearly crawl over what actually is the final rise, there’s Munroe sitting next to his dust collector, taking my picture.

At this climb’s halfway point, I had told Munroe I’d seen lots of good spots along the way for his dust collector—the implication being that such a long hike might not be necessary. But he tells me there’s “a method to [his] madness.” In the summer, sheep are brought up to these alpine meadows to graze. He’d learned how high the sheep usually get and placed his collector well above that point.

So eight-plus miles later, Munroe, O’Keefe, and Wasson repeat yesterday’s process. As they work, Munroe gives impromptu lectures on some of the terrain features we’d encountered. Frost boils are bare patches of ground: here they’re mostly brick-colored dirt produced when frost pushes soil up from below. They’re bare because the soil’s movement doesn’t allow vegetation to take hold. Sorted polygons and stripes—known as patterned ground—are areas of soil and vegetation bordered by larger stones. During repeated freezing and thawing, finer soils flow and settle underneath larger stones, pushing the stones aside and creating geometric figures on flatter terrain and stripes on steeper sections.

Once dust collection is complete, I take a picture of the three researchers with the spectacular Red Castle in the background. The red-tinged rocks and spires, which look like an enormous cathedral, have become the traditional backdrop for a celebratory photo after reaching, at 12,500 feet, this highest collector. Then we start back down. Seeing black clouds to the west over other jagged Uinta peaks, we depart with some urgency. No one wants to be caught out in this open country, far above the tree line, in a thunderstorm.

*

In the spring of 2013, Munroe was promoted to full professor. He also became the first winner of Middlebury’s Gladstone Award for Excellence in Teaching, which includes a stipend to support collaborative work with students.

Munroe used the funding to take three students to Utah at various times over the summer. Emily Attwood ’14, Paul Quackenbush ’14, and Sam O’Keefe ’16 gathered dust from the collectors, collected dust from snowfields, took core samples from lake sediments, and collected soil samples. The students then based their school-year work on these experiences: Attwood wrote a geology thesis; both Quackenbush, a geography major, and O’Keefe worked on 500-level independent projects. After doing lab analysis on the materials they’d brought back from the mountains, the students helped Munroe with a paper concerning this project. They also submitted abstracts of their work to a conference in Castellaneta Marina, Italy.The conference’s name is DUST 2014: An International Conference on Atmospheric Dust.Attwood’s abstract concerned dust in snow; O’Keefe’s was on dust in lake cores; and Quackenbush’s was dust and soil development.All were accepted, so in June 2014, Munroe and the students attended the conference, with Munroe presenting a paper on Uinta dust deposition coauthored by the three students. Each student also did a poster presentation.

Attwood remarks on the novelty of presenting in front of atmospheric scientists at an international conference—“we were definitely the youngest people there”—but says the collaborative experience was par for the course. “In the geology department, as in some other departments, the professors encourage field experience,” she says. “You get to know your professors on a different level, hiking with them for hours during the day, cooking meals with them, swapping stories. And you learn in such a different way than you would in a classroom. You can just ask them all the questions you want. You’re right there in the field and something pops up, and you say: ‘What does that mean? Why would that be there?’” Attwood, a former Nordic ski racer at Middlebury, now teaches skiing and winter ecology at a Montana ski center.

Quackenbush now works for an environmental consulting firm outside Boston and says that “being involved in the lab work, getting to review the paper with Jeff and make suggestions on that, and seeing how that whole process plays out is an experience that very few [undergraduates] get to have. But I think Jeff strives in his classes and his labs to give students a chance to understand how academic research really works.”

While we were in Utah, Munroe learned he had been awarded a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation to help support further work on dust in the Uintas. The grant will support the placement of more dust collectors—bringing the total to eight—from one end of the Uintas to the other. Munroe also anticipates having dust gathered from the collectors twice a year rather than just once.

According to the NSF, Munroe’s work with student collaborators was an important factor in approving his grant. Reviewers addressed his past work with undergraduates, along with Middlebury’s commitment to providing students with research opportunities. “The robust participation of undergraduates is clearly an important element in the success of this project,” read the foundation’s award letter.

The new grant started last summer, and Munroe immediately made plans to return to the Uintas with Middlebury student Ryan McElroy ’16. Munroe asked Tony Desautels if he could build five more collectors—four to put in new collection spots, and one to replace a broken collector discovered last summer. Desautels had the collectors ready when Munroe and McElroy headed out at the end of September.

In a week, they placed the new collectors, replaced the broken one, and revisited three of the remaining collectors, along with taking lots of soil samples. The grant also envisions using lake sediment cores collected during past Uintas visits to do a study on a geologic time scale of dust deposition.

It’s heady stuff, and I mention to Munroe how advanced this all seems. He nods. “I never use a book in any of my classes anymore,” he says, “because by the time a book is published, it’s out of date. For the price the students are going to pay (for a book), I’d much rather they read journal articles. I know it’s a big step up. These were not written for undergraduates usually. But, boy, they can make headway by figuring out something that’s presented in a journal article from this week or from last year.”

“That’s how science is done. It’s not a static series of assembled, time-tested material. It’s very, very dynamic.”

Tim Etchells ’74 spent more that a year dropping in on Jeff Munroe, observing the geologist in his natural environment as a teacher. In addition to chasing him across the beautiful Uinta landscape, Etchells sat in on classes and put on waders to join students in the Middlebury River lab. He also hitched a ride with Munroe and his wife, Diane—who frequently accompanies her husband on trips to the Uintas—when they took 30 Middlebury alumni to the top of Killington Peak in Vermont as part of a sold-out session on “The Mountains of Northern New England” at Alumni College in 2014.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/on-a-sea-of-stone/feed/0noThe way geology professor Jeff Munroe navigates Utah’s Uinta Mountains and other landscapes reveals something about what it means to be a Middlebury teacher and researcher Middlebury MagazineThe way geology professor Jeff Munroe navigates Utah’s Uinta Mountains and other landscapes reveals something about what it means to be a Middlebury teacher and researcher middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/on-a-sea-of-stone/The Research Paradigmhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/apb17JoXFnw/
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In the days following last year’s terrorist attacks in Paris—first in January on the Charlie Hebdo offices and then the horrific events of November 13 that left 130 people dead—many national media outlets turned to Middlebury political scientist Erik Bleich, asking him to contextualize these attacks committed by Islamic fanatics.

Bleich, whose scholarship focuses on race and ethnicity in the politics of Western Europe, had just spent a year abroad in Lyon, France, furthering his research so he was expertly positioned to comment. Also attracting media interest were two recent scholarly articles Bleich had published on how newspapers portray Muslims and Islam.

In one, published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Bleich and his coauthors examined how British newspaper headlines from 2001 to 2012 represented Muslims. The other, which appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, assessed the tone of New York Times headlines from 1985 to 2013 concerning Muslims and Islam.

In fact, Bleich’s research upended conventional wisdom, finding that headlines about Muslims have not been predominantly negative, and that in the New York Times, headlines about Islam and Muslims actually became more positive over the period studied, even after the 9/11 attacks.

Bleich, who has made Islamophobia here and abroad one of his focuses, finds his research exciting. But he gets just as excited talking about his research methodology. On the first article, Bleich’s coauthors were Middlebury students Hannah Stonebraker ’13, Hasher Nisar ’16, and Rana Abdelhamid ’15. The second was coauthored by Nisar and Abdelhamid.

“Starting from scratch and with student input,” Bleich says, “we developed a way to download, process, code, and analyze newspaper headlines for their tone toward Muslims.” At a research university, he says, the project would have involved faculty researchers and grad students. And “undergrads would be used, if they were used at all, for the coding: ‘Please read these hundred headlines and enter into an Excel spreadsheet what you think the tone is: positive, or negative, or neutral.’”

At Middlebury, Bleich says, his students were collaborators, helping to consider what the team wanted to learn from the project over the next few years and how to learn it.

Undergraduates as collaborators has a long history at Middlebury but is, by all accounts, more common today. From geologist Jeff Munroe trekking through Utah’s Uinta Mountains to study dust deposition to Bleich and his deep dive on media representation of Muslims, faculty members often arrive at Middlebury with an active research project and continue to pursue it—usually with the help of students.

Jim Ralph ’82, a history professor and dean of faculty development and research, says the College encourages faculty members to hire student research assistants both during the academic year and over the summer. They do so mostly via the Faculty Research Assistant Fund (FRAF) for general student support and via the Undergraduate Collaborative Research Fund (UCRF) for more collaborative student work—often anticipating that a poster, an article, or a book will result.

Lisa Gates, associate dean for fellowships and research, says the summer program in particular is growing quickly. In 2015, close to 140 students were involved and most were on campus. A summer research symposium has joined the popular spring student symposium as another showcase for student work.

Febe Armanios, an associate professor of history, has used both FRAF and UCRF grants and coauthored papers with students. She now has two books in progress, and for both she’s used student research help. One book is on the history of Christian satellite television in the Middle East. The other, on halal food, which she’s writing with her husband, UVM History Professor Boğaç Ergene, came from teaching the class, Food in the Middle East: History, Culture, and Identity. She worked on it while a fellow at Harvard during the fall of 2014.

Armanios points out that Middlebury’s faculty come primarily from larger research universities.She, for instance, got her BA, MA, and PhD at Ohio State. Because graduate schools have become increasingly competitive, most of those who apply to become faculty at Middlebury have published extensively and have significant investments in their research interests and projects. “We’re now bringing in edgy, current, up-to-date scholars,” says Armanios, “who are the best and the brightest in their areas, and who are also really great teachers.”

Armanios says that when Middlebury students work with faculty and do their own research, they’re learning ways “to have a fuller and richer experience of what being at Middlebury is about. It’s not just being a passive recipient of knowledge in the classroom. They actually have a role in the production of new knowledge.”

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Zach Perzan ’14 agrees. A geology major, he worked with professors Jeff Munroe and Will Amidon on his thesis, which reported on his work in Vermont caves, the Weybridge Cave in particular. The most recent glacial advance, which ended approximately 14,500 years ago, did not disturb some deep caves. And sediments found there—some 30,000 to 100,000 years old—can provide clues about the climate in the northeast pre glaciers.

Perzan’s research work with Middlebury faculty has taken him out in the field and to conferences all over the country. Last spring, he presented at Posters on the Hill, an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., that celebrates undergraduate research. “I really haven’t heard about friends from other schools doing this level of side-by-side research,” he says. “You go to a conference and see students and professors doing a poster, and when a question gets asked, the professor responds. Here, you have to deal with anyone who wants to grill you on your work.”

The enterprise certainly seems to have value for teachers and students. “Students who are here for summer work, for example, say it was not just a paycheck or something that looks good on their resume,” says Jim Ralph, “but a really transformative educational experience.”

And that’s true regardless of whether students are heading to graduate school. “The value of research is in enhancing your critical thinking skills,” says Erik Bleich, the political scientist. “It’s really about thinking hard and systematically and meticulously about how the world works, and about how to make an argument about what’s really going on. I think that pays off no matter what their careers are.”

Bleich believes that Middlebury is better learning to appreciate the value research has to the institution as opposed to the value it has for individual faculty members and students. Research, he says, is not just something faculty members do to get tenure.

“We want to encourage our students to engage with the world,” Bleich says. “And that’s exactly what research is. It’s being engaged beyond the walls of Middlebury. So to the extent that we are engaged in research as a faculty, we are really modeling what we ask for in our students.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/the-research-paradigm/feed/1noDebunking the myth that serious research doesn't exist at a liberal arts college.Middlebury MagazineDebunking the myth that serious research doesn't exist at a liberal arts college.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/the-research-paradigm/Can a Place Like Aspen Go Green?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/GTNl8lwHtD4/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/can-a-place-like-aspen-go-green/#commentsMon, 15 Feb 2016 19:42:57 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14558

In a posh resort town where private jets zip in and out, Matthew Hamilton ’95 has an answer for all the skeptics out there.

On a February morning at Aspen Highlands, Matthew Hamilton ’95 makes fast time up the boot-packed trail to the 12,392-foot summit of Highland Bowl. It hasn’t snowed in a while, but Hamilton—tall, gregarious, with a huge, toothy smile—is in good spirits. This is in part because his job requires him to go skiing and in part because the conversation is about green energy, a topic he could discuss long after the lifts have closed and après has begun.

For the past five years, Hamilton has been the sustainability director for Aspen Skiing Company (ASC), which runs the four ski resorts in and around Aspen, as well as properties throughout the Roaring Fork Valley. ASC is regarded as one of the most forward-looking companies in the business. Outside magazine and the Best Companies Group have made it a regular on their Best Places to Work list, and Condé Nast Traveler chose it as one of its top 10 destinations for eco-travel. The company, as well, has earned a slew of awards from local, state, and national organizations.

Hamilton’s job is both to preserve that reputation and to improve upon it. His work takes him to sustainable tourism conferences around the world, as well as to Washington, D.C., to promote renewable energy initiatives and climate policy. You might find him chatting about compost with a ski lodge staffer, leading technical meetings about the output of snowmaking equipment, reviewing audits for various LEED certifications, or negotiating with sponsors like Red Bull about ways to green events like the X Games, which Aspen hosted in 2015.

In addition, Hamilton spearheads ASC’s philanthropy work, directing the Environment Foundation. (Contributions come from ticket sales and employees who donate a few dollars from each paycheck to support local causes.) ASC also encourages its 3,400 employees to do two days of community volunteer work per year, which translates into a potential 15,500 hours.

Hang on, though. This is Aspen we’re talking about. It’s safe to say that billionaires flying private jets in and out of exclusive hamlets so they can, in an evening, blow $100,000 on imported wine and schuss down slopes chiseled from native forests don’t constitute a victory for Mother Nature. It’s all well and good that the on-mountain restaurants stock recycled napkins and offer locally sourced beef, or that Skico’s Limelight Hotel urges guests to go easy on the laundry. But considering
the colossal and urgent challenges climate change poses, one could conclude that sustainability at a posh ski resort is code for greenwashing.

Yet Hamilton’s work—and his response to this specific criticism—suggests a less cynical reality. “We are aware of our impact and constantly work to mitigate it,” he says.

Despite the elevation at Highland Bowl, Hamilton doesn’t sound at all winded. As we hike, he ticks through an exhaustive list of solar, water-conservation, and energy-efficiency initiatives that ASC has undertaken. Then he pauses, looking out west toward the summit of Snowmass and the jagged peaks of the Maroon Bells.

“If you define sustainability as being in business forever, then changing light bulbs, composting, etc., is good and fine. But if you don’t do the rest of it, you’re just scratching the surface. What’s the point?” By “the rest of it,” Hamilton means making the move from operational greening efforts to advocacy.

*

Hamilton first beganconsidering this distinction as an undergraduate studying political science and environmental studies, and then during graduate studies in public policy at Georgetown. At the end of the day, he says, winter recreation is just that. Even if Aspen were miraculously to become a net-negative consumer of power, water, gas, food, and so on, climate change based on current national and international rates of fossil fuel burning will continue apace, which threatens the livelihoods and lives of tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of people. All of which makes the greening of ski area operations sound somewhere between cute and irrelevant.

Yet the Aspen name is not irrelevant. “Meaningful action happens in the halls of our statehouses, board rooms of electrical utilities, and the halls of Congress,” says Hamilton. ASC employees and guests might measure the company’s sincerity by its offering of recycled napkins. “But we can have our biggest impact through leveraging our brand and the influence of our guests, pushing for substantive action on climate and energy policy.” So last year, swapping out his telemark gear for a gray suit and purple tie, Hamilton spent a day lobbying on Capitol Hill. ASC has joined a coalition of businesses that includes Nike, Starbucks, Patagonia, and Unilever in advocating for energy and climate legislation.

*

Closer to home,Hamilton’s team does have plenty to boast about. ASC has pledged to reduce its CO2 emissions to 25 percent of its 2000 levels by 2020. The 147kW solar-electric system ASC built on a nearby ranch is the largest such system in the ski industry, and ASC has lent support to several wind and solar developments throughout the region.

The flagship project isn’t located near the ski slopes or fancy stores at Aspen Mountain’s base. It’s beside a coal mine in the tiny town of Somerset, 70 miles southwest of Aspen along the Gunnison River. In a partnership with local mining and energy companies, ASC has spent $5.5 million on the country’s largest facility for converting methane from coal mines into usable electricity.

Methane gas is pumped out of mines to protect miners. And almost all mining operations release that gas into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. In fact, it’s 25 times more potent. The idea of capturing it and putting it to better use is not new, but only a few such plants exist in the U.S. The plant in Somerset produces 24 million kilowatt hours—roughly what ASC uses annually. The other benefit, of course, is doing away with methane that would otherwise drift up into the atmosphere. For Hamilton, this project exemplifies what it means to move beyond amorphous notions of sustainability to deliver actual economic and environmental results.

Hamilton, however, rejects the idea that gestures—on-mountain placards about climate change, fuel efficient snow-grooming machines, or even those napkins—are only superficial gestures meant to burnish a company’s image or assuage a resource-devouring clientele’s guilt. “Every initiative taken by a business is an important step towards reducing that company’s impact.” True, two kilowatts of solar on a building that requires 412,000 kilowatts is a drop in the bucket. “But when coupled with educational information and touted publicly, even those two kilowatts can be a powerful influencer of behavior and conversation that in turn motivates larger actions in an employee’s or guest’s life.”

Aspen’s influential clientele can also magnify the impact of these gestures.

Brands, along with the eco-conscientiousness people inevitably encounter during their stay, influence guests whether they’re conscious of it or not. “If they have a chance to look up from their smartphones,” says Hamilton, “they will bump into a message—about climate change, about mining rights, about lighting, about water conservation.” Hopefully these messages affect people—even long after their ski vacation has ended.

Back at Highland Bowl’s summit, Hamilton offers to take photos for a few fellow skiers, then tightens his boots for a run down more than 1,000 vertical feet of soft, wind-blown snow. Before we set in, he shares an anecdote about a recent exchange with a reporter from London who was writing about carbon footprints and ski vacations. He had emailed Hamilton some straightforward questions about eco-friendly operations, and Hamilton, as always, was happy to talk about the good work ASC is doing regarding sustainability.

But the journalist’s final question was trickier: because some 75 percent of the carbon emissions from winter sports can be attributed to travel, wouldn’t it be better for the planet if skiers and snowboarders from Europe didn’t fly to Colorado and instead vacationed closer to home?

Hamilton’s answer: Yes, but.

“My initial response was, ‘Yeah, he’s right.’ People should minimize their carbon footprint vacation closer to home.” That isn’t the whole picture, though. “If a skier really cares about the climate issue, then he has to couple good decisions like skiing locally with broader personal activism on the politics of climate change.” That activism, Hamilton believes, has to include demanding of the resorts we patron both environmentally progressive practices and efforts to move the public-policy needle. “At the end of the day, I think we differentiate ourselves with activism, lobbying, and action on the ground.”

And then he took off down the hill.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/can-a-place-like-aspen-go-green/feed/2noIn a posh resort town where private jets zip in and out, Matthew Hamilton ’95 has an answer for all the skeptics out there.Middlebury MagazineIn a posh resort town where private jets zip in and out, Matthew Hamilton ’95 has an answer for all the skeptics out there.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/can-a-place-like-aspen-go-green/What It Means to Be Kelly Brushhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/_ev9NJb92Dk/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/what-it-means-to-be-kelly-brush/#commentsMon, 15 Feb 2016 19:33:42 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14549

A decade removed from a ski-racing accident that left her paralyzed, a young woman navigates a new course.

Were this a true celebrity profile, one of those longform pieces you’d read in Vanity Fair accompanied by black-and-white Annie Leibovitz photos, we might see Kelly Brush Davisson ’08 lounging poolside at the Château Marmont, ordering a glass of something bubbly as she tosses back her hair and toys with her watercress salad.

Instead, picture this: Central Provisions in Portland, Maine, where Brush, 29, dressed in a fuzzy champagne-colored sweater, asks for a ginger ale. She’s starving—but she’ll pass on the bluefin tuna crudo, opting to tuck into the pickles and an apple salad instead. This isn’t just because Kelly, a nurse practitioner at Martin’s Point Health Care, is on call—she’s pregnant. (Her iPhone keeps lighting up with texts from various relatives who’ve just heard the news.)

It’s early November, a Tuesday evening that feels like a Friday night because tomorrow is Kelly’s day off from work. She and her husband, 30-year-old Zeke Davisson ’08, have plans to spend it walking their dog, Lexi, and getting their car windshield replaced.

A fellow diner interrupts the conversation,recognizing Kelly and her wheelchair. “I went to Middlebury with you!” she exclaims in delight.

And that’s how it is being around Kelly Brush, who, 10 years after catching an edge while skiing the GS at the Williams Carnival, has become a literal poster child for ski-racing safety. But really this celebrity is just like us.

*

Kelly first strapped on skis when she was two years old.In the beginning, she was darting around the trails at Bolton, Vermont, and soon after, she was on the flanks of 4,393-foot Mount Mansfield at Stowe. Often she was rushing to keep up with her older sister, Lindsay, and the children of close family friends. It was her first taste of ski racing, with more official races on the immediate horizon.

“Kelly won everything when she was seven years old,” says her mother, Mary Seaton Brush, during an interview at their Charlotte, Vermont, home. “She won so much she was immediately going to the Olympics in her mind.” And for good reason. Mary, a University of Vermont graduate and former U.S. Ski Team athlete, competed in the 1976 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, and she encouraged the racing life for her two girls. “Traveling and racing all over the world was so meaningful, so exciting, so much fun,” she says. “I really wanted them to have those life experiences.” The trophies and plaques decorating the Brush home speak to those experiences: entire walls given over to ski-racing photos that range from black-and-white to faded ’80s colors to the bright neon of the ’90s.

“As an athlete, Kelly was just fearless,” says her sister, Lindsay Brush Getz ’07, who now directs operations at Summit Property Management and Green Mountain Development, a pair of family-owned companies in South Burlington. “She just had this ability to go for it, no matter what.”

Eventually, Olympic aspirations became tempered, but the Brush girls remained fierce racers, attending the Green Mountain Valley School ski academy and then Middlebury, where their father, Charlie Brush ’69, had skied and then coached for 10 years. Mary shows off a collage that Kelly made in sixth grade: laminated photos of Mead Chapel, Woody Jackson cows, and February graduation at the Middlebury Snow Bowl.

Kelly says she never felt pressured to follow both her father and sister to Middlebury. It felt natural for her to replace the dream of Olympic glory with dreams of racing at the Snow Bowl.

As we tour her home, Mary shows me the adjoining wheelchair-
accessible apartment overlooking a glittering pond. This is where Kelly and Zeke stay when they visit, and it’s decorated with posters of Casablanca and Gone with the Wind, a tribute to Kelly’s film major. There are also two shelves that run high on the walls lined with Vermont Teddy Bears. “Those came to her at Berkshire Hospital,” Mary says of the stuffed animals.

Berkshire was the first hospital.

“The first couple of days, they said it could just be swelling, and it could go down,” says Mary. We’re sitting at the kitchen table now, and she grows momentarily silent after I ask her what the lowest low of the last 10 years has been. “Then the doctor said we’re going to need to turn her so she doesn’t get bed sores. All of a sudden her future became clear. ‘Is this real?’ So that was it, probably when I first realized that she wasn’t . . .”

Tears, on both sides of the table, interrupt our conversation.

*

February 18, 2006.Kelly’s excited to race, having for the first time just beaten her older sister in a GS race and having been selected from a large and very competitive squad to represent Middlebury at the Williams Carnival. It’s a “perfect ski-racing day,” she notes—cold but clear, blue skies and grippy, solid racecourse conditions.

Kelly’s coaches and teammates are anticipating her run. Forest Carey ’00, the Middlebury alpine coach from 2003–2006, often speaks about superstar athletes who find another gear on race day. He mentions Ted Ligety, Bode Miller, Julia Mancuso—all of whom he’s coached in his stint as U.S. Ski Team head coach.

“You can talk about technique and athleticism, lactate threshold, all that,” Carey says. “But it’s about on-demand execution—those who ski better when they race than when they are training.”

Eighty percent of all ski racers don’t have this, he adds. But Kelly is one of the twenty percent who does. And as she tips into the Williams racecourse, she’s looking great in the eyes of her coach and dad, Charlie, who is watching from the slope.

“And then I see her spin,” he says.

Charlie pauses and a sob gets caught in his throat. (The tears don’t always come, Mary has mentioned, making one dinner at Fire & Ice, when Kelly was readjusting to campus life in a wheelchair, all the more difficult. “Kelly didn’t cry very much,” recalls Mary. “The rest of us cried around her, so when she started crying, we all started bawling. The poor waitress!”)

At Williams, Charlie skis down to where Kelly lies on the snow and flings himself down next to her. He’d seen the fence she tore through. He’d seen the sturdy lift tower that seemed to break her body. He knows something is terribly wrong, and he shouts to wake up his daughter.

“Kelly, Dad’s here!”

Almost immediately, he realizes his daughter is not breathing.

“The most frightening point in my life,” he would later say.

*

August 4, 2012.Lindsay, the “meticulous drawer” as a child, the crafty one, has been planning her little sister’s wedding to Zeke Davisson, a fellow ski racer, at the Charlotte Congregational Church. The reception will be at the Old Lantern, an 1800s barn where more than 200 guests will watch Zeke spin Kelly in her wheelchair during their first dance.The first-dance song, “Broken Road,” by Rascal Flatts is a not-so-inside ski-racing joke.

“It was an extra sappy song, but we’re not that sentimental,” recalls Zeke. “I just tried to keep my toes from getting run over.”

“I had a crush on Zeke right from the start,” says Kelly during an interview in their three-bedroom home in Cumberland, Maine. Signs with Snow Bowl trail names and a shot-ski emblazoned with Z and K—mementos from the wedding—rest against an open fireplace.

Zeke, who grew up in Maine and attended Gould Academy, competed on the same circuit as the Brush sisters. He even shared a podium with Kelly when they were in high school, though neither remembered this until they noticed it many years later while looking at old pictures.

The two both played JV soccer at Middlebury and would walk to practice together. By midwinter of Kelly’s first year, they were a couple. There was no “meet cute,” as in the movies, but the way they finish each other’s sentences and bicker playfully about the details of memories from college is somewhat cinematic and endearing.

During their walk at the Twin Brook Recreation Center with Lexi, an energetic Vizsla, Zeke pushes Kelly’s chair at the trail’s rough parts. (While Kelly is independent and shares domestic duties of cooking and cleaning with her husband, Zeke has a sixth sense for when she might need help.) One imagines it’s akin to how he carried her and her chair to just the right spot on Katama Beach on Martha’s Vineyard when he proposed, or how he wheeled Kelly throughout Europe—Iceland, Ireland, London, Paris, the French Riviera, the Loire Valley—on their honeymoon.

“He is an amazing man,” Charlie says of Zeke.

“He doesn’t open up about the details of what he said to her in the hospital,” says Mary. “He might have said, ‘You’re going to be fine.’”

But whatever Zeke said at Kelly’s bedside, for the days and then weeks at Berkshire Hospital and next at Denver’s Craig Rehabilitation Hospital, he helped soften the harsh edges of Kelly’s reality: a collapsed lung, a fractured vertebra, four fractured ribs, and, at the T 7/8 level, a severe spinal cord injury.

“I was really, really thirsty. I was so thirsty, I said, ‘Can I have some water?’” Kelly recalls of first waking in the ER after the injury.

She was annoyed and confused, too, by everyone asking her if she could feel her feet. And why did she need an MRI and a CAT scan?

“My mom told me that I had hurt my back. I don’t have any memory of someone telling me, ‘You’re paralyzed. You’ll probably never walk again.’”

“It was a much slower process,” Kelly says.

After 18 days at Berkshire—five of which Kelly was confined to the intensive care unit—she was flown to Denver for two-and-a-half months of learning how to navigate her new life.

Seeing so many people struggling with disabilities crushed her father. “This was not a happy place,” he says.

He felt helpless to stand witness to it. “Because the struggle,” he says, “is way more intense than you could possibly even know. In Colorado, I saw 75 percent of the families run over by the situation.” These families couldn’t handle it, he says, and they walked away.

*

December 3, 2015.Kelly is a pediatric nurse practitioner, an experience born not from her time adjusting to the T 7/8 fracture, but partly from when Kelly was young and her mom would watch Rescue 911. Mary had wanted to practice medicine, and so she’d tune in to the show after the girls had finished their elementary school homework. “Kelly immediately decided she wanted to be a doctor,” says Mary with a laugh.

As well, starting when Kelly was seven—the same time she began ski racing—she would visit her grandmother in a Michigan nursing home. Some girls might have been spooked, says Mary, but not her daughter, who was radiant. “All these people were trying to touch Kelly, reaching out.”

“She’s always been caring and compassionate,” says Lindsay, who fielded her sister’s unsure calls after Kelly took her first job after graduation at ESPN, which was a thrilling opportunity but perhaps not the right fit. “In the spring, she said, ‘I have this epiphany. I know what I want to do.’”

Working with children fills Kelly’s days and fulfills her. “When I really help someone, and they really take what I say to heart, that’s satisfying,” she says. Up early for breakfast with Zeke, she leaves the house by 7:15 for work. When she gets home, she showers, eats dinner with her husband, and goes to bed by 9:30 p.m. She dreams.

“I dream both ways,” she says. “Actually, three ways: Either just being in a chair like normal; or not in a chair at all, and that’s also normal. The third comes in waves. It’s like, if you try really hard, then you can walk! And in my dream, I’ll be like, ‘Zeke, check this out, all you have to do is try really hard.’ Oh, wouldn’t it be nice if it were that easy!”

These are fun dreams, she says with a laugh. The frustrations have already happened: first with that terrible thirst and then in Denver when Zeke had to coax her to learn how to get dressed. “It was learning to do everyday things,” she says.

That summer of 2006, Kelly was in the new accessible apartment in her parents’ Charlotte home, catching up on studies so she could return to Middlebury as a junior in the fall. “The first semester was hard,” she says, “trying to figure out how to get to and from classes. There were certain hills I couldn’t get up on my own. Twilight!”

By the time the snow fell, however, Kelly was really strong wheeling up those hills. “She’d be looking at me like, ‘What are you doing, panting?’” says her close friend Rachel Bearman’08. “She was taking classes, going to parties, a continuation of all the things we did as friends before.”

Even though Kelly could no longer race, she had role models like Paralympians Chris Waddell ’91 and Sarah Will, and she soon discovered opportunities through her innate drive and was aided by modified athletic equipment. (Kelly would forerun the Middlebury Carnival as a senior. And she now plays tennis and golf, and handcycles, sails, and surfs in addition to skiing.)

In the fall of 2006, Forest Carey and the Middlebury Ski Team organized a 100-mile bike ride to help raise money for Kelly to purchase adaptive sports equipment. But when the community donated an astounding $60,000-plus, the family knew they had the makings of something bigger. That year, they launched the Kelly Brush Foundation, hoping to alter competitive ski racing by addressing safety in a way no other organization had attempted.

“Kelly’s accident, although so tragic for our family, and so tragic for her,” says Charlie, “started a movement that essentially changed the world of ski racing.”

The nonprofit now oversees the Kelly Brush Ride, an event that has grown from about 25 riders to more than 700 and that raised more than $380,000 in 2015, along with Inspire! fundraising events in Vermont and Boston. The Kelly Brush Foundation also provides grants for adaptive sports equipment and ski-racing safety initiatives. Zeke, a former attorney, is at the helm. He stepped into the executive director role in November 2014.

“When we first started, we said we were going to commit to a cure,” says Zeke. “The cure thing: everyone says that right away, because you can’t picture life in a wheelchair. But you don’t put your life on pause until the day they find a cure. The beauty of Kelly’s story isn’t that she has dedicated her whole life to spinal-cord issues. The beauty is she got injured and went right back to living her life, just in a wheelchair. She went back to school, graduated on time, tried a career, didn’t like it, went back to school, another career. A very normal path. That is what is interesting and unique.”

*

May 13, 2016.The due date for Kelly and Zeke’s baby. How do they picture life in a wheelchair with a baby to care for?

“I’ve been Googling a lot!” says Kelly, laughing as she places dirty coffee cups in their Maine kitchen sink and then shows off her laundry room, all routine parts of a regular existence.

A celebrity? She gives me a look like, get real. She’d rather talk about the fellow recipients—Steve Young, Madeleine Albright, Billie Jean King—she met in Washington, D.C., when she won the NCAA Inspiration Award in 2009.

“I might be the poster child for ski-racing safety and the foundation,” she admits. “But the fact that we’ve been able to live life normally: I hope people look at that and think that’s really cool. That’s OK with me. And if they don’t, that’s also OK with me.”

The couple are unsure about some aspects of their future. They’re considering moving back to Vermont, closer to the slopes where Kelly first learned to carve, with visions of their child learning to ski, and maybe to race, if that should be an interest.

“I worry about if we’re going to find a house to live in. I worry about if the baby’s going to be healthy,” admits Kelly. “I worry about if I’m going to be able to take care of the baby well: can I get them on and off the floor, in and out of the car?”

But they also display an assuredness and grace that comes from living through the past 10 years. Kelly is aware of life’s shadows but inclined to look for the light.

“Let me tell you a final story that is about resilience, and remaining awake, in body, mind and spirit.”

New Middlebury president Laurie Patton said this at her Convocation address last September when using the Kelly Brush Ride as a call to action: “How long will you dwell in distraction—focused on what you are not—instead of getting on with the glorious business of being who you are?”

*

February 18, 2016. The 10-year anniversary of Kelly’s injury. What will the Brush family do? Charlie’s 70th and Mary’s 60th birthdays are coming up, along with Kelly’s 30th, so they have many reasons to celebrate. But with the baby on the way, plans are up in the air.

But February 18 will be a day of joy. “It’s always a celebration,” says Kelly. “Every year, we celebrate. We don’t have remorse.”

And that is the glorious business of being Kelly Brush.

“I don’t know how you script this any better,” says Charlie. He refers to a poster that features Kelly smiling, along with the phrase “Embracing adversity, conquering challenge.” It reminds him of Kelly skiing in miserable conditions and refusing to complain.

“What you do is, you say, ‘It’s not a rainy day, it’s a good day.’ And that’s what Kelly has done—take the bright side,” he says. “That’s the way she gets up every day.”

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/what-it-means-to-be-kelly-brush/feed/6noA decade removed from a ski-racing accident that left her paralyzed, a young woman navigates a new course. Middlebury MagazineA decade removed from a ski-racing accident that left her paralyzed, a young woman navigates a new course. middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2016/02/15/what-it-means-to-be-kelly-brush/Road Taken: Awakeninghttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/MiddMag/~3/yTXQeFp-mBU/
http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/11/11/road-taken-awakening/#respondWed, 11 Nov 2015 16:16:13 +0000Middlebury Magazinehttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/?p=14530

Somewhere along the way modern America lost its sense of scale. The coasts seem to have grown more proximate. Our neighbors have inched closer. Everyone appears to know everything about everybody. Maybe the Internet is to blame, or the airplane, or even the car. But no one seems to notice. At least I didn’t—not until last summer, when a friend and I embarked on an unorthodox trip from Buffalo to New York City.

The plan was to paddle the decade-old, 17-foot, obnoxiously red, recreational Old Town canoe my father had given my mother for their 19th anniversary. We were going to go along the Erie Canal and down the Hudson River. By car Buffalo to New York is seven hours and a tank and a half of gas. By canoe, it’s three weeks and 20 cans of soup. Setting out, we weren’t sure if we would encounter a small portion of a big world or a big portion of a small one.

We felt every mile. The canal has a 10-mile-per-hour speed limit—a restriction I’d always thought laughingly slow until I considered it from the stern of a canoe. Paddling as hard as we could—dip, swing, dip, swing, dip, swing, j-stroke—we’d hit about 5 mph tops. But after 20 minutes, even that was out of reach.

I was surprised our slow progress wasn’t demoralizing. Instead, as we slipped along past farmland that endlessly stretched from the water’s edge—past abandoned mills and factories, past dense tree cover—our journey’s slowness accentuated the distance we covered. There was something deeply satisfying about every day’s small progress. Thirty miles on the water contained more than 300 on the interstate.

There were pieces of the canal that I had crossed daily for a large part of my life—mundane trips in the car headed to school or the store—but from the water everything was different.

I barely recognized my own community. From the canoe I saw the backs of buildings or a random swing set, and my brain wouldn’t register these familiar landmarks from a different vantage point. And the canal itself was unfamiliar. What I had always assumed was a meandering vestigial feature of a less-refined era revealed its elegance in gentle curves and long straights that were far more direct than the ribbon of roads we passed under.

Leaving the canal behind, the Hudson brought further revelations. Every mile
possessed abundant detail—the smell of pine needles, the hum of the freeway that was almost always in sight, bald eagles soaring overhead, aquatic life just beneath the water’s surface.

And then there were revelatory moments: container ships on the Hudson sound like a cross between a jet engine and a dinosaur, and when I viewed them from the surface of the water, I found judging their distance or movement almost impossible. With their skyscraper stacks and mammoth hulls, these water-crawling beasts obscure both the shore and landmarks. For what seems like hours, they don’t appear to move. Until suddenly a ship rushes past, leaving a fury of displaced water in its wake.

And then those moments, too, passed.

When we reached the Inwood Canoe Club in Manhattan—19 days and 450 miles from where we’d begun—I was relieved, satisfied. Still, I couldn’t shake one feeling. With all of the new sensations I’d experienced, I started wondering what I’d missed while looking the other way—or not looking at all.

The world no longer seemed quite so small.

James Lynch ’16 interned with the magazine last summer and is continuing on as a contributing editor. An English major, he is writing his senior thesis on his canoe trip down the Hudson.

]]>http://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/11/11/road-taken-awakening/feed/0noCanoeing from Buffalo to New York City, a Middlebury student gets a lesson in scale.Middlebury MagazineCanoeing from Buffalo to New York City, a Middlebury student gets a lesson in scale.middlebury,College,Liberal,Arts,College,Middlebury,Magazine,Vermonthttp://sites.middlebury.edu/middmag/2015/11/11/road-taken-awakening/Middlebury MagazinenonadultDispatches from Middlebury Magazine